Last Year's Snows: An 'Education Sentimentale'
by Doc M
Summary: A book-verse alternative ending, in which lessons in life and love await 2 girls, 3 boys, and a goat. 11: Pâquette begins her lessons, but who is really teaching whom what?
1. Maître Gringoire, Advocate & Logician

Much as I love to wallow in a good tragedy, I always thought the principal characters of _Notre Dame de Paris_ (and one young man especially!) deserved happier fates, so here is my alternative ending, a sort of _education sentimentale_ for two women, three men and, of course, a _goat_.

**Last Year's Snows: An 'Education Sentimentale'**

**1: 'Maître' Gringoire, Advocate & Logician**

…_Et de la corde d'une toise  
Sçaura mo col que mon cul poise._

(…_And on two yards of hempen tow  
My neck my arse's weight shall know._)

François Villon, _Quatrain in Expectation of Execution _(1462)

The anchoress, once called 'La Chantefleurie', had told her pathetic tale, but Tristan L'Hermite remained unmoved. The hangman, Henriet Cousin, began to drag the two women out from the ruins of her cell towards the gallows in the Place de Grève. Provost d'Estouteville looked on, holding back his assembled troops.

"No!" shrieked Pâquette, clinging desperately to Esméralda. "She is my child! My Agnès! My daughter!"

There seemed no hope of reprieve. Then, they heard the clatter of dainty cloven hooves on the cobbles, and running footsteps. It was Djali, galloping as fast as her legs could carry her, tugging Gringoire breathlessly behind on the other end of her leading-string.

"Pierre!" Esméralda cried.

He stopped, and paused to recover himself. He absorbed the scene before him. Quick-witted, he calculated…

He cleared his throat. "Would you gentlemen kindly explain what you are doing with my _wife_?"

"Your _wife_?"

"The old witch or the young one?"

Pâquette stared. "Agnès – you're _married_? To _that_ long, skinny–?"

"I'll explain later!" Esméralda whispered.

"Who are you, anyway?" asked the hangman.

He bowed flamboyantly. "Pierre Gringoire, poet, tragedian, and philosopher; _Magister Artium_, late of the University of Paris." (This was not entirely true, but he thought it was worth a try.)

Tristan nodded. "Ah yes: _you_!" he said gruffly. "The mountebank philosopher! We met but a few hours past at the Bastille. If you hold up this execution, you'll definitely be the _late_ –"

Gringoire drew himself up to his full height: tall and gangling, he resembled a stork in human guise. He raised his hand, assuming an air of authority. "Silence, _messires_! You cannot execute this woman!"

"Why not? It's the King's will! She's caused enough trouble in this city!"

"_Primo_: she is innocent. The chief capital charge against her was the murder of Captain de Châteaupers: the very same Captain de Châteaupers whom I passed in the street just now as he rode from here."

"And?"

"Do you not see that, since the Captain was here this very morning, and assuredly _not_ a ghost, then he cannot have been murdered in the first place by anyone?"

"The attempt's as good as the dead in the eyes of the law! Besides, there's the witchcraft!"

Pierre hesitated for a moment. "_Secundo_: that might be the case, but for another matter!"

"And what is that?"

"Can you be certain you have the _right_ woman?"

"What do you mean?"

"I could not help but hear this lady" – he indicated Pâquette – "who is known to all as the most devout Sister Gudule, and thus, I think, may be regarded as trustworthy, address her as _Agnès_."

"So?"

"What is the name of the woman whom you are to execute? It must be on the warrant!"

"La Esméralda."

"A gypsy?"

"Aye!"

"Sister Gudule," Gringoire said to the anchoress, "on what grounds do you believe that this young woman – my wife – is named Agnès?"

"Because I bore her! She is my own daughter, my Agnès. She was stolen from me! I have _told_ them! I have told them this! See?"

She showed him the little embroidered shoe; Esméralda held out the other.

"As these shoes match each other, she is my child. There's a note, too, with hers. Read it!"

She gave him the slip of paper, which bore the inscription:

_Quand le pareil retrouveras,  
Ta mère te tendra les bras._

_(When you find the matching shoe,  
Your mother will reach out to you.)_

He studied it closely, and nodded. He then passed it to Tristan, who in turn handed it to Robert d'Estouteville for scrutiny. The provost, too, nodded.

"And are _you_ a gypsy?" Pierre asked.

Pâquette raised her head, her big dark eyes – so like her daughter's – blazing in her gaunt face. "Certainly not! They stole my baby!"

"So your daughter is not a gypsy, either?"

"No!"

"So can you tell me what her name is in full?"

"Agnès Guybertaut. On my life, I swear it! By the Holy Virgin, I swear it! I am Pâquette Guybertaut, once called 'La Chantefleurie'. We are from Reims, both of us."

"So you see," Pierre said, "you do not have the woman named on your warrant! She is neither a gypsy, nor is she named Esméralda. You must, therefore, in all conscience release her."

"You chop logic like a butcher!" said Tristan.

"Or a lawyer!" added the provost.

Pierre decided to take this as a compliment, and bowed low. "Thank you kindly, _messires_! For that, you must thank my master, who has surely the greatest intellect in all Paris: I'm sure you're familiar with Dom Clau–"

"– But then there's the matter of the _goat_… Sorcery again… Does the beast have diabolical powers? Henriet, what do you think?"

Djali, at that moment, was nuzzling into one of Henriet's big, rough hands with practised winsomeness. "What a sweet little thing!" He stroked the soft white fur of her head.

"_Don't_ look into its eyes, man! It may bewitch you!"

"Ah! –_Tertio_: this charming creature is likewise as innocent as –"

Realising that Gringoire would continue for hours if he could, Tristan sighed. "Oh… damn you! Get out of my sight, all of you! And out of range of my nose! I don't know which smells worse – the scabby old hag or the goat!"

"Djali does _not_ smell, _messire_!" Pierre retorted. "She is usually bathed daily! And as for calling my mother-in-law a hag –"

Esméralda raised a finger to her lips. He took the hint, and, for once, fell silent.

Henriet laughed. "Well, _my_ mother-in-law _certainly_ is!"

"Now be off with you before I hang the lot of you!"

"_What_ will the King say?" asked the provost.

"I think," said Tristan, "that he will say we would be more usefully employed mopping up the last dregs of the _Cour des Miracles_… This gypsy trollop is a trivial distraction! And, if we let him, that idiot philosopher husband would keep us here all day, talking the hind legs off a donkey!"

"– Or, indeed, off a _goat_!"

* * *

Pierre hurriedly dragged the two young women (and the goat) around a street corner and then into a smaller side-alley. "Quickly, get out of sight before they change their minds! – _Pasque-Dieu_! But that was close-run!"

They pressed themselves close to the wall. Pâquette's eyes darted about fearfully. After fifteen years in one cell, she had forgotten how big and noisy was the outside world when one was _in_ it, not merely observing. Even here, she felt afraid. Djali lay down in the dirt: she would need another bath after this, her master thought.

"You came back for me! I didn't know you'd be so brave!" Esméralda exclaimed. "When you left with Djali –"

He wondered for a moment if gratitude might, at last, make her truly his wife. Then he shuffled, and looked at the ground. "Actually, it was _Djali_'s doing. She didn't want me to leave you! I just hung on, for fear she'd get lost!"

"Still, it was cleverly done!"

He whistled. "By the skin of my teeth, my sweet! The skin of my teeth! Thinking on my feet! But then, as I said, I was taught logic by the most erudite of masters, Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe, and keeping up with _him_ in argument is –"

"_Don't_ mention that _devil_ of a priest to me again!"

"Devil? But it was he who helped us –"

"– And gave you back to me, my child," said Pâquette softly, smoothing her daughter's hair with bruised and bloodied fingers. Her exertions in wrenching out the window bars had exhausted her. "After all these years!"

"Mother, he only gave me to you to hold while he called the guards! – Pierre, your master _betrayed_ me!"

"What?"

"He led the troops to us! He forced me to choose – the gallows or his bed! The gallows or…_him_."

"You didn't help _yourself_, calling 'Phœbus!'" her mother muttered under her breath.

Pierre struggled to comprehend Esméralda's words. She had said it simply, plainly; but he could scarcely believe it. _Not_ his master – his wise, kind master…

"Then where is he now?" he asked.

* * *

Since a one-eyed (and far less intellectually acute) observer on a tower of Notre Dame had been unable to interpret clearly the events in the Place de Grève, the answer was more alarming than Gringoire could have imagined. Indeed, at that very moment, high above the city, a black-robed figure was struggling to cling on to the cathedral's guttering…

_**To be continued:**__ The archdeacon has a practical lesson in ærodynamics._


	2. Dom Claude Comes Down to Earth

**2: Dom Claude Comes Down to Earth**

…_suffero _per su amor_  
supplicium._

(_I suffer, for her love,  
execution/punishment._)

Anon. 12-13C, _Doleo quod nimium_ (_Carmina Burana_ MS)

His cassock tore, and the lead at last gave way. Claude Frollo tumbled through the dawn light, a black, fluttering shape, like a raven pierced by a fowler's arrow.

He did not scream. He _deserved_ this death. To stand unshriven before the Throne. He knew what awaited him: it was carved and painted on the Judgement Portal. His soul would be weighed and found wanting, and the demons would lead him down to Hell. He was already aflame…

"All that I have ever loved!" Quasimodo sobbed above him.

And all that _he_ had ever loved. His spoilt, infuriating, adored little brother, spine broken and brains dashed out… The girl – his desire, his torment, his perdition – doomed to the gallows-tree by his own hand…

…_Ou sont ilz, ou, Vierge souvraine?  
Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?_(1)

(For a moment, he saw again the wise, sad face of the old Canon of Saint-Benoît, who had carried as his own cross a brilliant, bad nephew, lost twenty years ago…)

_Solvet sæclum in favilla_…(2)

The breeze, catching in his rent clothing, hurled him towards the steeply-pitched roof of a nearby house. The ridge-tiles broke his fall – by breaking his ribs. He cried out, but instinctively, with the last of his strength, he scrabbled to hold on.

Some of the onlookers who had stood gaping up from the Parvis ran into the courtyard of the building. Women dropped their milk-pails, leaving blue-white streams between the cobblestones. Men hammered at the door: servants hurried out, and the householders, still in their chemises, straight from bed.

Claude heard a clamour of voices, far below:

"What in God's name is that?"

"It looks like a _priest_!"

"Up _there_? – I've heard of a night on the tiles, but that's ridiculous!"

"Shut up, you half-wit! He's in _danger_!"

"Fetch stout blankets and sheets!"

"Somebody _do_ something!"

"He's a madman!"

"Did he fall or jump?"

"He'll break his neck!"

"Poor bastard! He'll be down before anyone can get a ladder up!"

Indeed, the angle of the roof was too steep; his body too weak, too racked with pain. His shoulders, already badly wrenched, dislocated. His torn fingers, slippery with blood, lost their grip. In agony, he began to slide downwards like a loose tile.

"Quick! Catch him!"

Now barely conscious, Claude felt himself falling again through space. This time, he landed safe (though far from sound), a tangle of limbs and ripped cassock, in a linen sheet, held out by several of the men. They lowered him, with great gentleness, to the ground.

"It's all right, we've got you… Be careful with his arms, will you?"

"Jesus! It's the Archdeacon of Josas!"

"…Always was something devilish about him… Trying to fly, eh?"

"Is he still breathing?"

_Of course_ he was still breathing, he thought: each breath felt like a knife slicing him in two. The housewife laid a hand on his chest. Drenched with sweat, he coughed: there were flecks of blood on his lips.

"There, there… Don't try to move, Father; just lie still… – He's burning up, poor lad!"

"Someone fetch a surgeon!"

"Better a priest, I fear!"

"Get a plank or something to carry him! The Hôtel-Dieu –"

"The _public hospital_? God's Blood, he's a _gentleman_! The Vowesses are just around the corner!"

"André, be a good boy and run and tell Mother Sibylle!"

"Dom Claude, can you hear me? Stay with us! Dom Claude…?"

But his sight was fading, fragmenting like a mosaic. The voices around him grew distant. He gave in to the darkness, expecting no mercy…

* * *

(1)_ Where are they, where, Virgin Sovereign?But where are last year's snows?_ (François Villon, _Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis_, from _Le Grand Testament_). François Montcorbier had been raised by his kinsman, Father Guillaume de Villon, much as Jehan was raised by Claude, and had failed even more to assimilate his guardian's values.

(2) _The world dissolves into ash _(attr. Thomas of Celano, _Dies Irae, Dies Illa_ (mid-13C))

_**To be continued:**__ Lodgings sought for a man, two women and a goat…_


	3. Sackcloth & Ashes

**3: Sackcloth & Ashes**

"_C'est d'umaine beaulté l'issue!  
Le bras cours et les mains contraites,  
Les espaulles toutes bossues;  
Mamelles, quoy? toutes retraites;  
Telles les hanches que les tetes;  
Du sadinet, fy! Quant des cuisses  
Cuisses ne sont plus, mais cuissetes  
Grivelees come saulcisses."_

("_This is human beauty's fate!  
The wizened arms, the clenched-up hands,  
The shoulders bent and humped;  
Breasts, what breasts? All shrivelled up;  
The hips the same state as the tits;  
The sex? – Hah! And as for the thighs,  
Shrunk down, no longer worth the name,  
And mottled just like sausages_._"_)

François Villon, _Les Regrets de la Belle Heaulmière_, from _Le Grand Testament_

"Pierre, I don't care whether that man is on this earth or in Hell where he belongs, so long as he's well away from me!" Esméralda said. "Where should we go from here?"

"I have family in the city," said her mother, then corrected herself: "_We_ have family. Ask for Pradon, Rue Perrin-Gasselin* – brazier and coppersmith. I think he died not long ago – my uncle. But there are cousins…"

"Somehow I _don't_ think this is the best time for meeting long-lost relatives," Pierre observed.

"Why?"

"It's _far_ too close to the Châtelet for my liking! Besides, look at us! I mean, look at _you_!"

The anchoress had not washed for years; and her black sackcloth gown – her only garment, which slid rather _too_ far off her bony shoulders for decency – was lively with vermin.

"I hope you haven't given Djali fleas!"

"Pah! You and that goat!"

"He _is_ right, though," said Esméralda. "I doubt they'd thank us for turning up on their doorstep in this state! But still… Where _can_ we go?"

"The eye of a storm is always calmest, so I've heard," Pierre said, as if to himself. He began to direct the women, and Djali, on to the Pont Notre Dame. Like so many bridges of those days, it was a street, lined with houses and shops, which were already opening for business.

"What are you doing?" asked Esméralda. "Not _there_! No!" She had last seen the archdeacon running towards the bridge from the Grève, to alert the sergeants. She did not want to face that madman again this side of Hell.

"It's the best place! If they _do_ have a change of heart, the last place they'll think to look is the place from which we fled! That is, _unless_ they think that's what we'll be thinking, in which case… Or, on the other hand, they may think we'd think that, but that we'd then think they'd think that out, and so they'd think we'd…"

Pâquette sighed. "Perhaps _you_ should stop thinking so hard."

Esméralda looked at her mother, and smiled in amused recognition: she had already got the measure of Gringoire.

"Trust me, please! I'll protect you!" he insisted, with a show of confidence that was more to convince himself than the women.

They crossed the bridge and, without directly approaching the cathedral, wandered aimlessly for a while through the narrow streets on its north side.

"I can't go much further," said Pâquette, sinking down beside the arcaded front of a baker's shop. She had walked no further than up and down her cell for fifteen years: she was exhausted and disorientated, and her bare feet hurt.

"Do you need help, dearie?" asked an old woman.

"We need shelter and food," Pierre answered. "My mother-in-law is tired and ill. And my goat needs grooming."

"There's the Hôtel-Dieu… Mind, after t'other night's riot, I doubt there's room! And I don't think they take animals!"

"She's _not_ an animal! She's _family_!"

"Hm! Well, you could try the Widow Dorel's. The Vowesses might help."

"Nuns?" asked Esméralda nervously. They would not approve of her, she thought: a dancing-girl with a performing goat some deemed demonic.

"Well, avowed widows. They collect waifs and strays. _She_ gives herself airs like an abbess, mind – calls herself Mother!"

"It's worth a try," said Pierre. He had heard a little of her reputation, but not much more.

The type was not uncommon in the cities of the day. Sixteen years ago, Hugues Dorel was a wealthy cloth-merchant; his wife, Sibylle, a plain and pious dame of forty, housekeeper and mother to eight living children, aged from twenty to four. When pestilence had struck that August – the same visitation that had orphaned the Frollo brothers, and killed tens of thousands beside – the good lady was robbed in the space of a week of her husband and all her children, and came close to death herself. She might have lost her wits, but decided instead that her own life had been spared for a purpose. Her husband's death had left her with a fine town-house, in the shadow of Notre Dame. Over the years, she gathered several other widows about her. They devoted themselves to practical piety: making soup for the poor and for pilgrims; collecting and mending old clothes to be given to the poor; taking in and tending a few old folk or invalids. However, unlike the Béguines, then common in the Low Countries, they had taken vows. Their patroness was St Anne, the mother of the Virgin, and the Widow Dorel could not have been more lofty in manner had she herself been Christ's grandmother.

The house was tall and narrow, stone-built, with a projecting, timber-framed upper floor. It did not appear particularly welcoming, but Pierre knocked all the same.

The door was opened by a stout middle-aged woman, habited and veiled in black. "What do you want?"

"Is this Widow Dorel's?"

"It is."

"We are poor and hungry, and in distress. I was told you gave help to such as us."

"Well, come in, then! – But not the goat!"

"If the goat goes, we go."

"No, no! I meant, she can be tethered in the yard." She gestured to a servant lad, a sprightly, freckled scamp of about twelve, to take charge of Djali. "Simon, feed her some kitchen scraps, and _don't_ let her eat the herbs! – You three, come in! I'm Sister Geneviève. You must excuse us – we're awfully busy this morning!"

She led them down a passageway into a stone-flagged kitchen at the back of the house. They passed a few other women, all middle-aged to elderly, in the same black gowns and veils, bustling about.

"What a stink…! It's like the pit of hell in here!" Pierre said. Although it was a warm summer morning, the fire was burning under a large cauldron of water. There were smaller pots brewing foul-smelling sulphur concoctions that were surely medical rather than culinary.

"Bad eggs," Pâquette muttered. "You've been cooking bad eggs. Children used to throw them sometimes, through the bars…"

"No, my dear, it's not eggs, it's brimstone for poultices. As if last night wasn't bad enough, there was a _frightful_ accident… I didn't see – I was in the laundry when they brought him in, but – Poor young man! Oh, if you'd heard the cries when the surgeon – Oh, awful! Awful!"

"I see. You mean it's not convenient for us…?"

"Oh, no! Far from it! That's all in hand! Mother Sibylle's put him in her own room, and he's had the _Viaticum_… But where have you come from in such a state?"

"It's hard to explain," said Pierre.

"The Grève," said Pâquette.

Sister Geneviève looked at them through narrowed eyes. "The _Grève_?" She scrutinised Esméralda. "You're that gypsy dancer, aren't you? With that goat? They were going to hang–"

Pierre cleared his throat. "Ah! That's _all_ been sorted out with the authorities! A case of mistaken identity! She's definitely _not_ a gypsy! Although the goat _is_ a goat."

"Indeed, my name is Esmér– I mean, _Agnès_. And these are my mother and my… husband."

Pierre bowed: "Pierre Gringoire, philosopher and man of letters, at your service."

"Yes," the good sister said sceptically. "You used to do that trick with the chair and the cat, _didn't_ you? _Very_ philosophical! Well, as long as you don't try it indoors!" She then looked at Pâquette: "And where were you hiding, my girl? Buried alive in the Innocents?"

"No: in the Tour Roland these fifteen years."

She gaped. "_You_ are the anchoress? Sister Gudule? Then how did you…?"

"I did penance for the loss of my daughter. And now my daughter is lost no longer."

Geneviève, herself a mother, softened at this. "Oh, you poor dear!" She reached out to embrace her, but then drew back, noticing _tiny creatures moving_ on the surface of her hair-shirt. "Ah! I see! I do believe some cleaning is required! – Messire Gringoire, I suggest that for the sake of modesty, you step outside and attend to your _goat_. Simon will draw some water from the well for her; please tell him, too, to bring more in here."

He obeyed.

As soon as he had disappeared through the back door, Sister Geneviève dragged a steep-sided wash-tub into the middle of the stone floor. She tested the water that was heating over the fire, and poured a pitcher of it into the tub.

"Sister, will you please stand in this? Now, arms up, there's a good girl!"

Pâquette did as she was told, exchanging a puzzled look with her child, who was starting to scratch her shoulder. Esméralda plucked off the exploratory louse, and crushed it.

Now Geneviève swooped down like a somewhat overweight bird of prey, whisked the sackcloth gown over Pâquette's head: the latter yelped in pain as it tore off some of her scabs with it. She hurled it into the heart of the fire, where it hissed and crackled.

"_That_ is where it belongs!" Geneviève said. "So much for hair-shirts! My second today! _Crawling_!"

Stark naked, save for her matted grey hair falling past her hips, the anchoress felt as if she were drowning as jugs of hot water were thrown over her.

"Keep still, dear! Oh, you're filthy! I'd scrub you, but your skin…! Oh, my poor girl! – At least I've strong nails for cracking lice!"

"Don't be afraid, mother; I'll help," Esméralda said, reassuringly. "Oh, whatever have you done to yourself…?"

For, as Sister Geneviève had said, the poor woman resembled nothing so much as a figure from the _Danse Macabre_ in the cloister of the Innocents, or one of those fashionable tomb effigies that represented the deceased as a desiccated corpse (or, to twenty-first century eyes, a catwalk model). Her arms and legs were sticks. Her shoulder-blades and collarbones jutted out sharply as the pauldrons of Nuremburg armour. Her paps hung in wrinkles, like empty leather purses, against skeletal ribs. And yet one could still see that she had been a beauty, with the same fine profile and large, lovely eyes as her daughter. In her ruin, Villon's _Plaint of the Helmet-Maker's Wench_ was made flesh again. But he had described a decrepit old whore of four-score years: the former 'Damsel of the Flowery Song' was still a young woman in her mid-thirties.

Hot tears fell from Esméralda's eyes as she washed the years of engrained grime and caked blood from her mother's body. She found dense scars on the shoulders, bosom and thighs – recognisable in those days as the marks of a penitent's knotted scourge. Fifteen years of the hair-shirt had chafed some into weeping ulcers, on the prominent bones of her back, and on and, most severely, under her pendulous breasts. Tenderly, she helped Sister Geneviève salve and dress them. Pity and love mingled with girlish vanity – that grief for _her_ had driven the poor woman to this!

* * *

Meanwhile, in the yard, Djali was refusing to be groomed. One bucket of water had already gone over young Simon and a couple of squawking hens, as the frisky little goat had trotted about. However, as it was turning into a hot day, the boy only laughed aloud, prompting a veiled head, with hatchet face, to emerge from an upstairs casement and issue a loud: "Shhhh!"

"Who's that?" Pierre asked.

"Mother Sibylle. She's always crabby! Mind, that fellow's takin' his time dyin' up there!"

"Perhaps he'll get better."

"The priest's been, so I bet he won't. I'll bet you a _grand blanc_ if you've got one!"

"Now, now! That's not something to wager on, young man! Do you know what happened?"

The boy shrugged. "My Mam said it was one of the lads from the big fight last night at Notre Dame – been stuck on a roof all night, or somethin'." Then his face lit up: "Did you see it, _messire_? I looked out of the window, an' there was hot lead and rocks flyin', like in a real, proper battle!"

"No," Pierre said. "I had other things on my mind… Now, my boy – if you run that way, and I run this, perhaps we can corner our little friend! She's normally much better behaved than this, but she has had a lot of excitement this morning!"

Within minutes, Djali was being held down firmly and washed back to her usual soft whiteness. She bleated sulkily. The hens glared.

* * *

Sister Geneviève's shears sliced off Pâquette's hair until it just brushed her shoulders, like a man's, and combed out the lice with a bone comb. Live ones and eggs she cracked in her fingernails.

"This is a clean house; we can't have you spreading that sort of thing in here," she said firmly.

Next, she brought both women some clothes. "Now, these are from the chest we have for giving to the poor. They're laundered and mended," she said, "so I hope you'll keep them that way."

Esméralda certainly felt better for having a clean chemise, kirtle and gown upon her. They were patched and darned – servants' clothes, certainly duller attire she would have chosen – but she felt less conspicuous than in her white novice's gown. Besides, she wished to put behind her the memories attached to her time in the habit…

Her mother looked – and sat – like a wooden doll, her emaciated body stiff with bandages. Her clean clothes were drab and far too big for her. She fiddled with the chopped ends of her hair, which stuck out untidily beneath the linen coif she had been given (as if she had ever been a married woman to wear such headgear!). She had forgotten how it felt to be clean, to have her sores soothed and tended. Bewildered by so much attention, she retreated inside herself, trying to make sense of the past few hours that had overturned her world. The burning eyes of the Archdeacon of Josas, when he had given her the gypsy to hold; the recognition of the embroidered shoe; how close she had come to seeing her daughter hanged in front of her; the sweet, silly, brave young man with the goat… It seemed as fantastical as a dream, from which she feared she would wake and find herself back in her damp, dark cell, alone.

Another vowess, haggard-looking, even more so because she was anxious, scuttled into the room and snatched up a bowl of poultice mixture.

"Ah – Catherine – how goes it?"

"Very bad," said the other, grimly. "We'll be needing yarrow, lots of it, infused and cooled, for drinking. His fever's worsening."

"Is there hope?"

"We must pray. Pray hard." She hurried out again.

"Can I help?" asked Esméralda. "I know _a little_ of herbs, and –"

"Oh, no! Mother Sibylle hates anyone to get in her way! It's crowded enough up there, anyway – she's got Catherine, Louise, and Isabeau running about at her beck and call. Besides," – and she looked at Pâquette – "your duty lies closer to home."

Pierre came back in. "My goat is duly washed and groomed, dear sister," he said, "and so, I see, is my mother-in-law!"

He bowed and kissed her grazed, bony hand. "You look charming, dear lady." It was a blatant lie, but he said it kindly, because she was fragile and wounded, with eyes were as frightened as a trapped bird's.

"There's probably a pot of barley broth somewhere hereabouts," said Sister Geneviève. "I just hope the smell of the brimstone hasn't ruined the taste… Ah yes, I _had_ covered it! Now, I daresay you're all hungry?"

Pierre tucked in heartily, while Esméralda coaxed her mother into taking a little bread dipped in the soup. She knew from her experience of travelling life on the roads that half-starved people should not eat too much, too quickly when they next find food in abundance.

For the rest of the day, they recovered from their trials, and tried to avoid getting in the way of the vowesses as they went about their duties. Djali was settled comfortably into straw with the hens in their house – and the hens made it _quite_ clear, with much clucking, that it _was theirs_ – in the yard.

Her humans were to sleep in the downstairs room usually kept for elderly paupers. There were two beds, one on each side of a partition which divided the room from floor to ceiling, separating men from women. Sister Louise, a short, red-faced woman, was _very_ firm on that: "Married or not, that's how it is here! Nothing of _that_ sort under this roof!"

Esméralda smiled sweetly: "It's quite all right!"

Pierre was resigned to his fate, but still he thought how he had saved her life that morning… Honestly, what _would_ it take to make her look at him as more than merely an amusing friend, assistant mountebank, or Djali's keeper?

And so mother and daughter shared a bed. It was a warm night, but they snuggled close to each other, as if the past fifteen years had been erased, and they were, once again, a young girl with her infant. There were so many years of desolate separation to make up.

Pierre had to sleep with the current resident pauper, know as Old Geoffroi, who was at least eighty and completely toothless.

"'S all right, son," he said. "Sometimes there's been four of us in this one bed… T'others have all died off…"

The old man snored and mumbled all night, keeping the poor poet awake. He envied Djali's snug straw, even among the bossy chickens, who struck him as the vowesses transformed, by Ovidian metamorphosis, into bird-form. Still… They were safe for the time being.

At least he got more sleep than the good sisters. Candles and oil-lamps flickered all night in the panelled bedchamber upstairs, where a man lay fighting for his life.

* * *

* Mahiette, after fifteen years, and not being a native of Paris, had either misremembered it, or garbled it in Champenois pronunciation, as "Rue Parin-Garlin" when she related Pâquette's story to her friends. See Max Bach, "Le Vieux Paris dans _Notre Dame_", _PMLA_, vol. 8, no. 4, Sept. 1965 (pp. 321-24), p. 324, on Hugo's error with this street name. It was behind the Châtelet, between the Rue Saint-Denis and Rue Chevalier-du-Guet.

_**To be continued:**__ Claude's life is in the balance…._


	4. Fire & Brimstone

**4: Fire and Brimstone**

_Sitot amors mi tormenta  
Ni m'auci non o planc re,  
Qu'almens mor per la plus genta  
Per qu'eu prenc lo mal pel be…_

_(Although love puts me to torture  
And kills me, I don't complain,  
For I die for the noblest lady,  
For whom I take evil for good…)_

Sordel de Goit, _Ai las, e que.m fan mei uelhs_ (mid-13C)

Above Mother Sibylle's high bed hung a large crucifix carved in the latest style: the angular figure contorted as if in spasms of agony; the flesh coloured in hues of decay and blood; the mouth twisted in the silent cry, _Eli Eli lama sabachthani?_ It was a macabre depiction of human suffering, all the more terrible by flickering candlelight. But still, it was only wood and gesso and paint.

Beneath it lay flesh-and-blood reality: a tall, swarthy young man, naked, wounded, delirious from fever and pain. For two days and nights, humid and heavy with the threat of thunder, Sibylle Dorel and her ladies worked in shifts, changing poultices and dressings, applying cold compresses and salves. Betwixt times they prayed, their _Ave_ beads click-clicking through their fingers:

…_Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,__  
Ora pro nobis peccatoribus,  
Nunc et in hora mortis nostræ_…(1)

* * *

Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas had been in a dead faint when he was carried in on a makeshift stretcher of planks and a blanket. Since it was hardly fitting that so respected a cleric should share a mattress with an old pauper (why, they might as well have taken him to the Hôtel-Dieu!), she had the men carry him awkwardly up the narrow stone staircase. He was laid on her own bed, propped up with bolster and pillows to aid his shallow breathing. Obvious broken ribs, she thought, and shoulders out of joint. She feared internal injuries.

Water was brought, and herbs, and clean linen. Father Thierry arrived from the cathedral with pyx, holy water and chrism. He sprinkled holy water about the room: "_Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor; lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor_…"(2)

Tenderly, so tenderly, the Vowesses of St Anne began to undress Dom Claude. It was the first time since his early childhood that women's hands had touched his body, but even the lightest touch brought only pain. He was bruised and grazed all over, his skin hot. Strange, they thought: they had expected him to be in a cold sweat, as people in shock usually are.

He was drifting in and out of consciousness. He felt the cold metal of a crucifix pressed to his lips. The familiar words, which he himself had spoken so many times, washed over him: "_Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatæ Mariæ semper virgini, beato Michaeli archangelo_… _quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa_…"(3)

The sisters cut and tore the buttons off the tattered black cassock, and cast it aside. His chemise of plain, but fine-woven, linen was stained about the chest and side, and across the back of the shoulders. If this meant the broken bones had torn through the flesh…

"_Accipe, frater, Viaticum Corporis Domini nostri Jesu Christi, qui te custodiat ab hoste maligno, et perducat in vitam æternam. Amen._"(4)

Claude murmured a faint "_Amen_". The priest placed the host in his mouth. He swallowed, and closed his eyes.

Mother Sibylle untied the laces of his chemise. Rather than risk further hurt to his shoulders by pulling it over his head, she decided it would be better to cut through the fabric. "The shears, please, Isabeau."

Father Thierry's patience snapped: "Mother, can you not wait –?"

Her nostrils flared, like those of the high-mettled horse she so strongly resembled. "_You_ are saving him for eternal life; _we_ are trying to save him for this one. We _can_ work together, but I doubt time is something either of us can afford to waste!"

Catherine unlaced and removed the archdeacon's shoes and hose. His knees and shins were scraped and bruised as a schoolboy's, and needed much the same treatment: bathing and ointment.

The priest proceeded with the sacrament, applying the blessed oil first to his eyelids: "_Per istam sanctam Unctionem et suam piissimam misericordeam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per visum deliquisti. Amen._"(5) Then, with appropriately amended words, he moved on to his ears, nostrils, lips, hands and feet, and the sins committed by the relevant senses.

Sister Isabeau, whose nose was her most prominent feature, was suddenly struck by the sheer absurdity and improbability of committing _any_ sin with it. She made an odd, choking sound, which the others took to be a sob of grief.

Meanwhile, Mother Sybille's thin fingers were already at work on the hair-shirt which Claude wore next to his skin, beneath his fine linen. It was stuck to his flesh with blood and sweat, and seemed to be home to a number of vermin. "This'll have to be soaked off…"

Father Thierry was galloping through the prayers: "…_Respice, quaesumus, Domine, famulum tuum Claudium, sacerdotem, in infirmitate sui corporis fatiscentem, et animam refove, quam creasti: ut castigationibus emendatus, se tua sentiat medicina salvatum. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen._"(5)

"Hurry up, Father!"

"There's only the _Domine sancte_!"

"Then get on with it! – Have we run out of the rosemary and marigold water?"

"There's not much left, Mother," Catherine said.

"I'll have it now, please."

Father Thierry finished his last "_Amen_" with a sigh of exhaustion. "I'll inform the Chapter," he said. "Mass will be said for him."

"Very good. I shall write directly to the bishop, also," Mother Sibylle replied. "Has anyone told his brother?"

He sighed. "That won't be necessary."

"What do you mean?"

"They say he was one of those slain in last night's disturbances."

"Oh, the poor boy! Does he _know_?"

"That _I_ don't know."

They looked at each other, thinking the same grim thought: _if the fall were not an accident, but a mortal sin_…?

"Well," said she, "least said, soonest mended. No scandal should be made of it."

"Indeed not."

"And there's the crippled child, too: break it to him gently."

"Quasimodo? He's deaf as a post, but I'll try!"

"Ask him to pray for him."

Father Thierry nodded. "If he gets worse, send for me by name. He was a good priest, a good archdeacon: hard-working, dedicated – not like some."

_Was_? That made her shudder. She was not ready to give up. She pulled the hair-shirt away from Claude's body: he moaned. As the priest went out, she hurled the pieces to the floor in disgust.

"Touch it as little as possible!" she ordered Catherine. "Take it down and throw it on the fire – whatever Sister Geneviève says – and tell Louise to bring up some more rosemary and marigold! Where's that surgeon got to? Did they send all the way to Montpellier or Salerno? – Isabeau, look at _this_! Oh, what _has_ he been doing?"

It was not the fact that the archdeacon's broad shoulders were raw from recent scourging that alarmed her. He had always struck her as the intense, ascetic sort – inclined to self-mortification – and the weals were not especially serious. But on his left breast and side were several older gashes, some deep, which appeared to have partly healed and then broken open – more than once. The suppuration was foul to eye and nose alike.

"No wonder we've not seen him about for a while!" muttered Sister Isabeau.

Mother Sibylle examined the largest hurt, just below the pectoral muscle. The surrounding flesh was swollen, marked with red lines, like the veins of a leaf, visible despite the bruises blackening his body.

"His death-wound, I fear," she said quietly, and crossed herself.

Someone tapped at the bedroom door. It was Sister Louise, clutching a pitcher of rosemary and marigold infusion, and accompanied by a burly, grizzled man in a sombre gown. "Mother, Maître de Saint-Loup is here!"

"Ah! Thank Christ! Come in! – Louise, thank you! Now, please tell Geneviève to make up plenty of brimstone poultices."

The surgeon bowed. "Rogier de Saint-Loup at your service, Mother. So, this _is_ your patient? I couldn't believe what was being said… The Archdeacon of Josas, eh?"

"They said he fell from the North Tower on to a roof. But he's already got a fever from these," she said, indicating the open wounds.

He rolled up his sleeves. "First things first: put him on the floor."

He helped the women lift the patient from the bed and on to the floorboards. He then forced each shoulder back in joint: inserting his foot into the armpit, and then pulling as hard as possible on the arm. Claude cried out, then fainted again. (Geneviève heard him in the kitchen, and in the yard, the hens squawked and fluttered in alarm.)

"Well, that'll shut him up for a while," Saint-Loup said. "Sometimes, brute force is all that works." He checked his body and limbs for any other broken bones, before putting him back up on to the bed. "Any signs of internal bleeding?"

"At first he coughed up a little, but that seems to have eased off."

"That's not unusual, with a knock on the ribs." He tapped Claude's back with his fingers, sounding his lungs. "Well, there's nothing serious, for now. It _may_ get worse, but for the present…"

He used his fingers to ease the fractured ribs into alignment. Mercifully, they were clean breaks, and, in a lean young man, were easy enough to find by touch.

"Usually, I'd strap them, but not with this…" He shook his head over the infected injuries. "What's happened here?"

"_I_ don't know," said Sibylle.

"A knife, I'd hazard, although after all this time… You've got brimstone poultices being made downstairs, haven't you?"

She nodded.

"Well, that's a start. Draw and drain the pus. It's good sign that it's forming already: a step towards healing, as Lanfranchi says. Laudable pus – good old Galen! Cool him down. Watch for these lines fading and retreating: if they do that, he's on the mend. If they spread, there may only be hours."

He supervised the first application of the sulphur poultices, and placed Claude's right arm in a sling. To allow easy changing of the dressings on his chest and side, his left arm could only be supported on pillows, and his ribs eased with cold compresses.

"Watch for any signs of bleeding in the lungs or belly, or more troubled breathing," Saint-Loup advised. "But if there are no complications of that order, the ribs should heal well. His shoulders just need rest, and soothing salves. These old wounds carry the most pressing danger. You know what to do: change the poultices every couple of hours. And _break the fever_. Cold water, herbs – buy ice from the ice-house, anything – but break it!"

"What about the pain?"

"What about it? In his state, the poppy could stop his breath completely! External use, though… And cold compresses will ease the bruising and swelling. But he'll just have to grit his teeth for a lot of it."

"You think he'll live?"

"I'm a surgeon, not a fortune-teller. In his favour: he's young and otherwise strong. He's been fighting this for a good few weeks at least – bouts of fever and delirium while the pus gathers, then a brief respite when it breaks; then it starts up again. A weaker man would have succumbed before now."

"And _against_ him?"

"Does he _want_ to live? He's studied surgery and medicine – I know, I've discussed it with him a few times – so why in God's name has he let his wounds get into _this_ state?"

"Knife-wounds, you said?"

"Certainly from the general look of them. Clergy _do_ get into brawls – mostly over women or dice! I've patched up my share of them!"

"Too ashamed, then? As a penance? Mind, I'd never have thought he was the brawling type!"

"You never can tell! But did no-one else _notice_? Did no-one else _care_? This hasn't come on suddenly! He must have been looking feverish – behaving strangely – having episodes of delirium! He won't have been in his right senses –"

"Well, he hasn't been about much for some weeks, that much I can tell you. I think I last saw him when that gypsy harlot was doing public penance for stabbing the captain, and that odd crippled boy of his snatched her into sanctuary. All very peculiar! The only person who's seen much of him lately _is_ that poor child, and I doubt he had the wit to realise…"

"That's true enough! But all the same… We must do all we can."

* * *

The nights were the worst, close and stifling. Throughout his delirium, Claude was haunted by the stench of sulphur. He knew that he was in Hell. He was lying naked on hot coals, surrounded by glowing-eyed demons dressed as nuns. From the pain in his back and shoulders, he knew that he must be on the rack. His chest was on fire. One of the devil-nuns, a hag-like creature with a raven's beak, was leaning over him, leering into his face.

"Fire and brimstone …" he murmured. "So this is Hell…_ Confiteor Deo omnipotenti…_"

"Hush!" Sister Isabeau said, changing the poultice. "It hurts and it smells, I know, but it's to cleanse your wounds."

"…_peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere_…"

"Hush, dear!"

"…Get behind me, daughter of Satan…"

"That's not very polite, is it? I'm trying to _help_ you!"

A little after midnight on the second night, the storm broke. Through the open window, Sister Catherine, silently telling her beads, saw the cathedral illuminated by forked lightning.

Claude was trying to force his way through a crowd in the Grève. He could hear jeering voices, crying insults at him. He was disgraced, a false priest… "_Salaud! Salaud!_" they cried, buffeting him. He fell to his knees. The mob surged about him: he would surely be trampled. But s_he_ was there, reaching out to him – or was she mocking, also? There was a rope around her neck; the more she reached out, the more it tightened. Her eyes bulged, her tongue protruded: the face of a hanged woman, becoming the mask of Medusa… Her hands became claws, tearing at his flesh, just as he had given her to the claws of the anchoress. Their faces seemed to merge before him, maiden and hag, becoming in turn the gorgon. Her talons were lodged in his breast…

He moaned: "Mortal sin… Esméralda…"

Mother Sibylle held him down, to stop him writhing on his pillows.

"Courage," she said softly. "Courage."

She made him drink more of the cooled yarrow infusion, and bathed him. Her eldest child, Philippe, would have been about the same age, had he lived: fine-looking, too. She could not look upon his suffering without feeling her own renewed.

Slowly, rain began to patter against the leaded panes. It grew faster and heavier, entering the room, falling on Catherine's face. The air began to grow cooler, less oppressive. She closed the casement.

Claude sighed: "Esméral…" At last, he lay still.

Mother Sibylle placed her hand on his forehead. Catherine looked at her, questioning. She smiled, but the candlelight caught the tears in her eyes. "I think he'll win through after all. He's asleep."

They took turns keeping vigil, watching as his breathing grew steadier. Only in the cool light of morning did they pause to wonder why he had called out for a street-dancer; moreover, one who was lodged below.

* * *

The storm flashed through the body of the cathedral, scattering patterns of brilliant colour across its floor. But in his small, lonely room in the tower, Quasimodo – who could not hear the thunder – only saw the white darts of lightening. Father Thierry had told him, in word and gesture, that his master lived, but was badly hurt. He did not know whether to be glad that he had not killed him, or afraid of some punishment to come.

"And Esméralda?" he had asked. "Did they hang her?"

The priest had shaken his head. "I don't know about a hanging," he said, emphasising his words so that the deaf boy could follow the movement of his lips. "I haven't heard about one."

Hope, then…

As the brightness danced around him, and kept him from sleep, he clung to that hope: that perhaps he had not lost all that he loved, after all.

* * *

1. …_Holy Mary, Mother of God,/ Pray for us sinners,/ Now and in the hour of our death_…

2. _Sprinkle me, Lord, with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow._

3. _I confess to almighty God, to the blessed Mary, ever virgin, to the blessed Archangel Michael… that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed, through my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault_…

4. _Receive, brother, the Viaticum of the body of our Lord Jesus Christ; and may he keep you from the malign foe and lead you to eternal life. Amen._

5._ By this holy unction and his own most gracious mercy, may the Lord pardon you whatever sin you have committed by sight. Amen._

6. _Look down, Lord, upon your servant, Claude, a priest, who is failing in the weakness of his body; refresh the soul you created, so that, brought to amendment by chastisements, he may feel himself to be saved by your healing. Through Christ our Lord. Amen._

_**To be continued:**__ Esméralda faces harsh truths about her origins, and Pierre keeps a secret_


	5. The Woman of Pleasure's Child

**5: The Woman of Pleasure's Child**

_Il n'est bon bec que de Paris._

(_There's no good gossip but in Paris._)

François Villon, _Ballade des Femmes de Paris_, from _Le Grand Testament_

Claude Frollo, bruised and battered by his fall and exhausted by fever, lay in Mother Sibylle's panelled bedroom. He spent a great deal of time sleeping, and when he was awake, the sisters spoon-fed him with broth or gruel. It would be some time before he knew what had happened to him, or even where he was: not for the first time, reality and delirium mingled, leaving him uncertain what was memory, what was fever-dream. So let us leave him to rest, until he is a little stronger and more clear-headed.

Downstairs, Esméralda threw herself into the task of nursing her mother back to health. Although repelled by Pâquette's oozing sores – which, she thought, could have made her a good living begging as a _malingreuse_ – she helped the sisters bathe, salve and bind them. She encouraged her to eat – the sisters made sure that she got good food, regardless of the day of the week. ("There are _no_ fast-days for invalids," Mother Sibylle insisted.) She combed her hair; she tried to make her look pretty in her ill-fitting charity clothes. Pierre was reminded of a child playing with a new doll, albeit an awkward, rather ugly one. The thought frightened him: children soon grow bored or bad-tempered, and throw away once-cherished toys in pique. He knew, too, that Esméralda idealised beyond reason those she loved. After fifteen years apart, the two young women had much to learn about each other. He wondered whether the daughter's unconditional adoration would survive what he had already begun to surmise about Pâquette from her conversation. He guessed that Esméralda had paid no attention at all to what she had told the authorities in the Grève. He waited anxiously, guessing that, whatever happened, he would be expected to pick up the pieces. Esméralda always expected more than she gave.

Indeed, it did not take many days for the cracks to appear. One morning, after helping change Pâquette's dressings, Esméralda forced her to look at herself in a hand-mirror.

"See, mother, you're still beautiful!"

"Don't talk nonsense!"

"But now your hair's clean, it's curling prettily, just like mine!"

"When did it get so _grey_? Oh, what a fright I look, Agnès!"

Her daughter grinned. "You're starting to look better – _for your age_!"

"The cheek of it! – Mind, I still keep thinking I should be one-and-twenty, and the horror it gives me to see…! That fifteen years have brought me to this! You should put me in a field to scare the crows!"

"Don't be silly! We'll make a proper, plump, middle-aged matron of you yet, have no fear!"

Pâquette laughed, shaking her head. "You can make me as plump as you like, but I wouldn't know how to _be_ one! I was twenty-one when I was walled in: I don't know _how_ to be 'middle-aged'! And as for 'propriety' – why, when I was young, in Reims…"

"What was it like then, mother?"

"Sweet and bitter, bitter and sweet. Oh, my dear, my dear…" A wistful look entered her sunken eyes.

"Are you thinking of my father? You must tell me everything you know about him!"

Pâquette smiled gently: "My father was Étienne Guybertaut, and he was a minstrel on the boats there. He was very accomplished: he knew many beautiful songs, by Machaut, and even old ones by that Comte Thibaut, who was King of Navarre. He had played for King Charles, and for the Virgin of Orléans, more than fifty years ago! My mother – your grandmother – was called Gilberte Pradon; she was much younger than him – I think he had been married before, but I'm not sure. He died when I was no more than ten or so: it seems so long ago…"

"You've told me this already! That is all about _your_ father!" Esméralda said petulantly. "What about _my_ father?"

"_Your_ father?" Her mother looked nervous.

"Yes. When were_ you_ married? Did my father die? Is _he_ still living somewhere?"

Silence. Then: "God alone knows."

"What does that mean?"

Pâquette steeled herself. "It's not an easy story to tell, Agnès. Promise you will not hate me for it?"

"Hate you? Oh, mother darling, how could I? I've just found you again after so long!"

She began carefully: "It was the year of the king's coronation. I was fourteen years old, poor but pretty in those days. My mother and I used to take in sewing – a lot of fine work, with beads and pearls – and we made trinkets and trimmings, and sold a little haberdashery, too. But my mother was starting to ail by then."

"But what of _my father_?"

"The Vicomte de Cormontreuil saw me going to church, and fell in love with me. He was not much older than myself, very handsome, very chivalrous! He said I would look even prettier in church with a fine gold cross around my neck. So, in exchange for that, I gave him something else, that could not be replaced."

Esméralda let the meaning sink in. So her mother had _not_ been married, which meant she was a bastard. On the other hand… "You mean my father is a _nobleman_?" She was thrilled: it reminded her of herself and Phœbus. Why, if she could tell Phœbus that she was of noble birth, albeit a love-child… She had always known she _must_ be noble, from the richness of the little satin shoe!

"– _No_," her mother continued. "No, he was expected to make a good marriage, so of course he let me go. But with the coronation, there were all sorts of splendid men in town: the king's master of horse, Messire de Triancourt; the sergeant-at-arms, Messire de Beaulion; Aubergeon, the king's carver; de Frépus, the Dauphin's barber; the royal cook, Le Moine…" She sighed wistfully at the memories stirred. "Oh, those were the best of times! I laughed my way from bed to bed because they loved my even teeth!"

"But which of them was my father?" (If not exactly noble, then a member of the royal household would do just as well, she thought.)

"None of _them_! No, you weren't born till I was in my twentieth year: St Paula's feast-day in '66. Times were harder by then. My mother was dead. I'd been with a vielle-player for a while – Guillaume Racine was his name: I used to sing for him. Then there was Thierry, who used to light the lamps… Then it came down to a thieving scoundrel of a pimp, who would beat me if I didn't bring in enough money from the taverns and the stews. You could be his, but I doubt it from your looks. I can't remember all the paying customers I had, obviously."

By now, Esméralda was staring blankly at her.

"Yes, I was a harlot."

The girl remained silent, stunned. Yes, yes, she vaguely recalled her mother saying something of the sort in the Grève, but didn't penitents always exaggerate their past sins to amplify their present virtue? She had not believed she had _meant_ it.

"Are you all right?"

"I don't know." This was not how it was meant to be. Her mother was supposed to be a princess, or a noblewoman, a great lady of some sort, at least. That was what she had always dreamed. The fine needlework and beading of her little satin shoe had told her so. "And you mean you've _no_ idea who my father was?"

She shrugged her bony shoulders. "No. I don't remember. Anything from a pedlar to a priest: I've had them all."

"_Priests_?" the girl cried in disgust: if her father should be a _priest_…!

"So? All cats are grey in the dark! They pay well, and, naked, they're no different –"

"_Mother_!"

"It was a _long_ time ago, Agnès!"

"But – a _whore_!"

"I was an anchoress far longer."

"But what does that make me?"

"No more and no less than what you've always been. What does it matter?" And she sang croakily, as if dandling a child, a verse of an old song:

"_Li rossignol est ton pere,  
Qui chante sor la ramee  
El plus haut boscage.  
La seraine elle est ta mere,  
Qui chante en la mer salee,  
El plus haut rivage._"*

"Mother, it's not funny! I kept myself pure – I believed I'd never find you if I didn't! I _suffered_ for it! Why couldn't _you_? Why couldn't _you_?"

She put her arms around the girl, and clasped her to her thin, bandaged breasts. "Then _you_ wouldn't be here, would you, my precious baby? You were the best thing that ever happened to me in my life! After all those men… Some of them were sweet, but oh, some were brutes…"

Her daughter wriggled free. "_Don't_ touch me!"

"And don't you think _I_'ve suffered, too? I paid for my sins every day for fifteen years – fifteen long years of prayer and fasting and penance and pain. Oh, Agnès, I was sure that it was for my sins you were taken from me!"

"My name _isn't_ Agnès; it's _Esméralda_!"

"I named you myself, for the virgin-martyr St Agnes! I bore you a few days after her feast, on St Paula's, but I liked her name better! And her pictures, with her little lamb, as you have your pretty little goat –"

"You bring the saints into this! _You_!"

"Why not? I lived like the holy Magdalene – like Maria of Egypt… It was hard – you've no idea how hard! My grief for you overwhelmed me, but sometimes… I've a sensual nature: it's how I'm made! I lost all shame at fourteen, and they say it's the chief sin of us women! I'd see young men passing my cell, or – worse – bringing me their griefs and troubles, and asking me to pray for them. One might have fine legs, another beautiful eyes, another comely shoulders, and in my mind, I'd picture them…" She broke off, collecting herself. "And so I'd flog myself until I swooned. I made my body, once the fairest in all Champagne, foul and ugly. I beat my desires out of me, until all I had left was my desire to see you once more on this earth before I died!"

"Then I pity you for it, but I can't love you!"

Esméralda ran through the house – almost knocking over stout little Sister Louise, who was carrying an armful of freshly laundered bed-linen – and out into the yard. She flung her arms around Djali's neck, and wept into her soft coat. The goat bleated sympathetically.

* * *

Pierre, meanwhile, had gone out to try to earn a few sous on the streets with some of his old tricks. They had all agreed it was too soon to risk a public comeback performance either by Esméralda or by Djali the World's Most Erudite Goat. He hoped they might receive a formal pardon for the former, while the latter needed to add some less incriminating words to her vocabulary. He hoped none would check (or hold it against him, if they did) that, in his defence of Esméralda, he had exaggerated (i.e. lied outright) about being a graduate: however, the job of an advocate, in his opinion, at least, was to bend the truth to his client's advantage. Besides, the education he had received from Dom Claude had been easily the equal of, if not superior to, that of any student of the university, as his tutor had often reminded him: if he had forgotten much of it since, that was his own doing. As a war-orphan, who had grown up scavenging on the streets, he had been lucky to have such a benefactor. However, he had already discovered that _other_ parts of his education were far more lucrative.

He had borrowed a chair from the sisters, and scooped up (with some howls and several scratches) a one-eared stray cat from the street corner, in order to reprise his most impressive feats of balancing.

A small crowd of spectators soon gathered, and a good number of coins (although none of great value) were thrown at his feet. Nevertheless, his new partner had no intention of working with him permanently. Once untied from the chair, the cat looked as unimpressed as cats always do, and stalked off with an air of injured dignity.

"Still, it's a delight it is to see you performing again, messire!" said a woman struggling with a shopping basket in one hand and a fidgeting seven-year-old in the other. "My little Michel is a great admirer of yours – _aren't_ you?"

The child pulled out his tongue. His mother elbowed him.

"Anyway," she went on, "it's good to have something cheerful! Dreadful things have been happening lately hereabouts!"

"The attack on the cathedral? Yes, I heard about it," Pierre said, feigning innocence and ignorance.

"And then the poor archdeacon! – But you must have heard about him, too!"

"What? Which one?" (There were, after all, three serving the diocese. But from what Esméralda had said about last seeing Claude running off in a distracted state to call the guards, Pierre was already worried.)

"Monsieur of Josas: Dom Claude Frollo."

He gulped. "Why? What's happened to him?"

"Well, his brother thrown from the tower in the riot! And then he himself –! Oh, it was terrible!"

"He's dead, too?"

"Well, no, I haven't heard that, but my neighbour heard it from her cousin, who saw it happen…"

"Saw what?"

"The very morning after, he fell from the north tower!"

"Then he _is_ dead!"

"Oh, no – he hit a house on the way down, and they caught him when he fell off _that_! He was still alive then, though he must have been badly hurt! God alone knows if he fell or jumped, or if he was trying to fly, like some said!"

"_I_ heard," interrupted a man, a joiner or cooper, judging by his dress, "that that demon-child of his _threw_ him off, to crack his soul out of his body, to take it off to Hell!"

Pierre passed his hand over his eyes. "_Pasque-Dieu_!" he muttered.

"You know him?"

"He was my teacher, and my friend."

"Oh, I'm sorry!" the woman said. "But people are saying _all sorts_ of things, and the poor fellow not even in his grave! _Demon-child_, indeed!"

"I want to see the _demon_!" piped Michel. "Better than that ugly cat! It only had one ear!"

"Oh, shut up!" his mother scolded.

Pierre felt queasy. My old friend, he thought, what has become of you? If Esméralda had told him the truth – and he saw no reason for her to have lied – about the archdeacon's desire for her, about him forcing her to choose between him or death, and his betrayal of her, then… Was he possessed, or sick? He remembered the priest's obsessive questions about the state of his marriage and the gypsy girl's chastity; his blushes, too. When they had met at the For-l'Evêque, and plotted her escape, he had noticed how ill Claude had looked – his ashen pallor, his hollow eyes and cheeks, his scant hair almost white. He had changed almost beyond recognition over these past few months, most drastically in recent weeks.

"Thank you for this news," he said. "It is… sad to hear."

He picked up the coins from the ground, and put them in the purse at his belt. Somehow, it was difficult to concentrate on balancing pyramids of chairs and cats with the thought of a man falling from a high tower. Cats, at least, tend to land on their feet.

He saw young Simon, who was struggling back to the house with a bucket of rapidly melting ice.

"What's this? Can you manage?"

"Better than you could, I bet!" the boy retorted, looking Pierre up and down. "Besides, you've got your chair! I been all the way to the ice-house for this, for him upstairs!"

"That's a lot of trouble! Surely the well-water's cold enough?"

"Not for Mother Sibylle! She won't have her young gentleman dyin' of wound-fever, she says!"

"Very wise! Who is this gentleman, anyway, that she's so attentive to him – a kinsman?"

"I don't think so. Definitely a gentleman, though, to be upstairs. My friend André – he lives across the street from me – says it's that priest."

"What priest?" he asked apprehensively.

"The one what was tryin' to fly: the tall, baldy one that goes around with that hunchbacked lad. André saw it: his mam sent him to tell the sisters. But I didn't see myself, so… And they don't want it talked about! Spreading scandal's a sin, Sister Geneviève says!"

Pierre felt a mixture of relief and anguish: relief that his teacher was still alive and was being nursed so attentively; anguish at what the news of his proximity might do to Esméralda. He decided to say nothing of it to her yet. She had enough to worry about with her mother's delicate health; and besides, if the archdeacon were as severely injured as everyone implied, she would have no need for alarm.

Simon clattered into the kitchen with his bucket. After depositing his chair there, Pierre went first to see Djali, tethered with her own bucket (filled with delicious vegetable stalks and peelings) in the yard. He hoped that she was learning to tolerate the hens, and they her.

But he was surprised to find Esméralda kneeling on the ground, her expression disconsolate, and her arms around the little goat's neck.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

She did not answer.

He patted the goat. Her fur felt damp in places.

"Have you been crying into my goat?"

"_My_ goat. She was _my_ goat first! – Oh, Djali, will they take everything of mine from me?"

"What's wrong?" He wondered for a moment if she knew about Claude, but decided otherwise. "It's nothing about your _mother_, is it?"

"Yes, it is," she sniffed.

"She's all right, isn't she? Or is she ill? What is it?"

"We've been quarrelling."

"Oh! Your first quarrel – so soon?" And he laughed.

"It's not funny… I'm starting to wish I'd never found her…"

"That seems excessive! Tell me all about it!"

"She doesn't know who my father is."

"So? Mishaps of that nature can happen to the best of people!"

"Because she was taking paying customers at the time."

"She – _what_?"

"She was a whore. A 'woman of pleasure'. A strumpet. A trull. Whatever you want to call it! A prostitute!"

Pierre scratched his chin. "Well, you should know as well as I do that that doesn't make her a bad person! Not necessarily, anyway! We've both grown up on the streets! Look at the _Cour de Miracles_! A better bunch of thieves, cut-throats and harlots you could never find – at least when they're not trying to hang you!"

"_You're taking her side_!"

"No, I'm just… Well, I just can't understand why you're so upset! You were lost to each other; you found each other after fifteen years, during which time she's lived a – an exemplary life of piety and penance – and you're fretting about what she was doing _before_!"

Esméralda sighed deeply. "What does it make _me_, though?"

"The same person you always were, only no longer an orphan."

"No, a whore's bastard!"

"I'm not sure how that's any more awkward socially than being a gypsy of unknown origins! And surely it says a great deal for her love for you that she had you at all? Often enough, when women of that kind fall pregnant –"

"– But I'm not even from one of her _noble_ lovers! That would have been something! Her first seducer was a vicomte! But no… Just some paying customer!"

"So long as he _did_ pay, eh? Far worse if he'd been the sort to run off without paying!"

"But I kept myself pure in order to find her!"

That stung Pierre. She had rebuffed him with a knife on their 'wedding night', but then – oh God! – He recalled how he had at first refused to believe that she could have been the girl arrested at the brothel for wounding Phœbus. The virtuous Esméralda, in one of the lowest 'houses of assignation', with a notorious rake? Had she spurned _all_ suitors, it would have been one matter; but to spurn _him_ for _that_? If he invested so much of his heart in the innocent affection of Djali, or in his new interest in architecture, it was at least in part from the sting of that disillusion.

"As pure as at La Falourdel's, with that popinjay captain?" he said bitterly.

"I've _told_ you, _nothing_ happened there! Your vile priest friend saw to that!"

"– But if he _hadn't_? How different is that from her and her vicomte?"

She hesitated, trembling. "That is _base_ of you, Pierre Gringoire! Base!" She burst into tears again. "I kept _myself_ chaste, but what was she? I kept _myself_ pure, and my reward is to find a mother who is… a harlot! Why did I even try…!"

He put one arm around her, the other around Djali. "There, there…" He was not sure which of them was in greater need of consolation.

He let Esméralda cry her troubles out of her system, giving her his handkerchief. It was unbecoming for her to use the goat, he thought.

* * *

Pâquette was sitting with her head in her hands when Sister Louise came in with a change of linen.

"That girl of yours is like a whirlwind! She nearly knocked me over, sheets and all! – Oh, is something the matter, my lamb?"

"May I talk to you?

"Yes, of course." She sat down on the coverlet beside her.

"The old man…?"

"Oh, he won't hear until you're right up close and shouting!" She bawled: "Isn't that right, Geoffroi?"

"What did you say, sister?" he called from the other side of the partition.

"See?"

The younger woman sighed. "Thank you. Do you have children?"

"Bore eight, raised five, buried three – and two husbands besides."

"I'm sure I don't know how to raise mine. When we were last together, she was fourteen months old; now she's sixteen, and – and…"

"You don't know what to do with her now? You knew her when she was a baby, but as a grown woman she's a stranger, is that it?"

She half-smiled. "Yes! I don't know how to _be_ a mother to her now… I hardly even know how I should comport myself at my time of life! But there's worse, too…" And she told her story over again to the pink-faced little woman.

"So: you were a sinner, but you repented, and God saw fit to restore your child to you? Instead of the prodigal son, the prodigal mother! That means we need to get more 'fatted calf' inside you, my girl, little by little! Geneviève's got a good, thick broth of it cooking, for you and for that poor boy…"

"You're all so very kind!"

"Well, that daughter of yours needs to come down a peg or two, if she thinks she knows better than our good Lord and our blessed Lady what's in people's hearts! Mind, they're all the same at her age – thinking they know it all, and better than their elders! But is it true she's the one that used to dance in the streets, with that dear little goat?"

"Yes, it is! Before I knew she was mine, I used to curse her from my window for her heathen shamelessness. The strange tricks fortune plays on us!"

"Indeed, so she can hardly cast any stones at you! And there was that scandal about the stabbing of that captain, even if, as Messire Gringoire says, it was all a mistake… That hardly looks good!"

"But she _is_ a _good_ girl, I promise you. She was tempted, but unlike me, she didn't fall."

"Hm," said Louise, shaking her head, "that may be the trouble with her! Pride, pride, the worst of sins…"

* * *

A little later, Pierre led Esméralda back into the house. She looked subdued and red around the eyes and nose – as did her mother. They embraced wordlessly. A temporary truce, then…

"I'm sorry if I'm not the sort of mother you wanted," Pâquette said softly. "But I can _try_, now, if you'll let me."

"It was the little shoes," the girl said. "The one I carried – it looked fit for a princess!

"I _made_ those shoes for you myself, with love. Every stitch and every bead. What I had to do to earn them, and all the other finery I dressed you in – yes, be ashamed of me if you will, but I didn't want you to have to go the same road. It was to be fine lovers and a finer husband for you, my dear!"

"It's just that I always hoped… I mean, if I _were_ noble-born, even bastard-wise, I _could_ marry one, couldn't I?"

"And why ever would you be wanting to do that, when you've got a good, sweet lad like our Pierre here? Even if he has no proper trade – _yet_."

Pierre winced at the barbs in her words, even as he was glad to hear her praise him.

"Mother, there are stories _I_ need to tell _you_…" Esméralda whispered.

* * *

* Pâquette has adapted a stanza from an old_ reverdie_ or spring song, _Voulez vous que je vous chant_, changing 'mon' and 'ma' to 'ton' and 'ta', in order to address it to her daughter:

_The nightingale's your father,  
Who sings on branching tree,  
In woods that grow so high.  
The siren is your mother,  
Who sings in salty sea,  
The steepest shore hard by_.

_**To be continued:**__ A case of mistaken identity…_


	6. The Hazards of Eavesdropping

**6: The Hazards of Eavesdropping**

'_Pour ung plaisir mille doulours.'_

('_For one pleasure, a thousand woes.'._)

François Villon, from _Le Grand Testament_

Pâquette's basic constitution was tough, or else she could never have survived fifteen years in her cold, damp cell, malnourished and anæmic. Nevertheless, like the injured man in the room upstairs, her strength had been tested to its limits. She was eating more, but her sores remained painful and slow to heal. Sister Louise helped her dress them with salves and soft cloths: Agnès had grown neglectful since their quarrel.

The sisters considered her as yet too fragile to help with housework. However, once the grazes on her hands were healed, they decided to give her some sewing to occupy her. She had told them she was capable of fine and fancy work – silks, beads and metal threads – but to begin with, to regain confidence, they gave her plain mending: a priest's cassock, freshly-laundered and in need of repair. God alone knew what the owner – a tall fellow, by the look of it – had been doing to it, she thought: one of the side seams had been rent from hem to armpit, and some of the buttons had been pulled or cut off. Mind, there had once been a canon at Reims whose clothes she had damn near ripped off…

She smiled to herself at the memory, then chided herself for doing so. She wondered whether love-making, like sewing, was something you never quite forgot how to do, even if you were out of practice. It was a sin, but a sweet one, even if her body was now too ugly for any man… She knew that she was under vows for life, but her old vitality of spirit was returning, despite her aches and pains.

She thought: had Lazarus felt like this after his resurrection, suddenly hungry for life, for experience? He had been in the tomb, in his cere-cloth, only a matter of days; she had been dead to the world for fifteen years, the funeral Mass read as she was walled in. She had sinned and had been punished by the loss of her child; she had done her penance, and had been rewarded with her daughter's return. That was how it was with Our Lord and Our Lady. Now she could live again.

When Pierre chattered about all he had learned on the streets and from his master, she hung on his every word:

"I'm not boring you, am I? You _can_ tell me to shut up! I daresay I'll sulk, but I won't hold it against you!"

"No! Not at all! I want to know everything! Just like you!"

And the boy blushed bright red, and pushed his lank, straw-coloured hair out of his eyes. "Well, I don't know _absolutely_ everything… Well, not _quite_…"

At least he always seemed to find something – however strange or absurd – to fascinate him, from plays to goats to architecture. Her daughter – Agnès, Esméralda – seemed strangely _in_curious, by contrast. She had travelled through many towns and cities, living and working with all manner of rogues and vagabonds – but her mind seemed as virginal as her body. She seemed as much of a spectator of life as Pâquette herself had been, and with far less reason.

She worked out of doors, on a chair in the yard, partly because it was easier to sew black in the sunlight, and partly to get some fresh air. It also meant that she could watch Esméralda teach Djali new tricks, while Pierre was out juggling for coins. She was growing fond of the little goat, although at this moment, she did not wish her to get too close and leave white hairs on the good black wool she was repairing.

Djali was having another spelling lesson, interrupted occasionally by chasing the hens away from pecking at her letter-tiles.

"No, Djali," Esméralda said, "I don't think you should spell 'Phœbus' any more. Pierre doesn't think it's safe!"

"Pierre's right," Pâquette said. "I can't think why you taught her to write it in the first place!"

"Because Phœbus is – is the sun! Is _my_ sun!"

"If you ask me, he's been more trouble than he's worth all along! You nearly got us both killed for him!"

"Don't say that!"

"It's true! I could have hidden you in my cell until the soldiers had gone, if you hadn't jumped up like that, just because you heard his voice!"

"I thought he'd save me!"

"As Captain of the Archers, on duty? How likely is that?"

"But I love him, mother! And he's a nobleman – I thought you'd approve of that!"

"Noble or not, some men are worth more than others. He didn't lift a finger when you were arrested."

"He was wounded!"

"He was better by the time you were to hang, so that's no excuse!"

"But I love him! Only for him did I come near to breaking my promise! He told me he thought I didn't love him if I wouldn't…"

"And you fell for that? It's one of the oldest lines there is! Didn't you learn _anything_ from the gypsies about men? They'll say anything to get what they want!"

"But I wanted him as much as he wanted me!"

"So what stopped you?"

"That mad priest! The Archdeacon of Josas! He stabbed my Phœbus out of jealousy! That was why I was arrested!"

"He doesn't sound so mad to me: more likely, he did you a favour!"

"How do you mean?"

"Think about it. You're scornful of me for my sins, yet you'd have gone the same road had you lain with your pretty captain!"

"No! That was different!"

"How? You surely didn't expect him to _marry_ you, _did_ you?"

"At first I did – but then he explained that marriage means nothing! So I told him I'd be content if he'd use me as his servant once he tired of me, so long as he loved me now!"

Pâquette rolled her eyes. "At least I made sure I got a fine gold cross from my little vicomte! A word of advice, Agnès: if you let any man above your garter, show some pride and get something solid from him in return!"

"Where's the love in that?" Esméralda asked sullenly, stroking Djali's ears.

"Love alone's not worth a denier! It may fill your belly all right, but _not_ with food; and one must always eat." She was beginning to appreciate food again. "You know, Pierre's a bit odd and surely no beauty, but he's clever and he may make some money one day. He just needs to get himself a _proper_ job – not with chairs, cats and goats, I mean. You should be more grateful."

"I _am_ grateful – well, at least I think _he_'s repaid _me_, for I saved him from hanging when we met! But… I can't _love_ him. As you said, he's no beauty."

"Beauty is all very well in a _lover_, but lovers and husbands aren't the same thing. Indeed, they're best kept separate."

"Which was what I was doing!"

"But a lover _isn't_ worth having if he'll give you nothing in return. It means he thinks you're worthless, and if you accept that, he'll _know_ you are, and that you'll put up with any nonsense from him. My God, even offering to skivvy for him!"

"You're very bitter."

"No, just realistic. And I'm sure your gypsy mothers would have said the same, if you'd taken it into your head to listen to them! In my old life, I had to learn to read men – and quickly. It's a matter of life and death. If you get it wrong, at best you might get a black eye, or forced to do things that hurt – and that _did_ happen to me, a couple of times; but at worst, you can end up with your throat cut or in the river. I know what men are: the good ones, the bad ones; the ones who'll do for an hour, and the ones you want as regulars, because they treat you well. Any man who'll take without paying is best avoided."

"But I know what I felt for him! When he saved me, and lifted me on to his horse! If only you'd seen him in his armour!"

"I've seen him ride by many a time. And many a time I've had girls come to my cell, asking for my prayers because of him – girls of my kind, of pleasure. I know his sort: if he hasn't a whole regiment of bastards to his name, it's only because the girls know how to bring the flowers down. _And_ he looks as if he'll run to fat."

"You shouldn't speak of him that way! He's like – like a knight in an old romance!"

She shook her head. "Agnès, _real_ men _aren't_ Knights of the Round Table. Believe me, they _don't_ really run mad for love through field and forest, like Tristan or Lancelot! They certainly _don't_ cast their lives, their hearts, their very souls on the ground at your feet for you to walk upon! And if they did, well –!" And she laughed.

Esméralda knew otherwise – but it had been the _wrong_ man. She was silent for a moment, then asked: "So what would _you_ do, mother – _if_ such a man existed?"

"Ask me how to cook a _unicorn_: it's about as likely!"

"But _if_ he did…?"

Her mother shrugged. "Well, I wouldn't know whether to grab him with both hands, or box his ears! Box his ears, I think, for making such a damned fool of himself!"

* * *

Maître de Saint-Loup made another of his visits that afternoon. Claude grimaced as the surgeon examined his chest and side, pressing around the edges of his wounds to make sure that the pus was completely drained. His battered ribcage ached enough without all this probing and prodding.

"Excellent! You've done very well in cleaning these up!" the surgeon told the sisters. "He should heal properly now." To Claude he said: "You're brave, monsieur, but it was foolhardy of you to let your hurts get so bad in the first place!"

He forced a half-smile.

As he regained his senses these last few days, he had been alarmed at first to realise that, bar the surgeon's visits, he was now dependent on women for every aspect of his care, however intimate. But since they were avowed widows, old enough to be his mother, he accepted that there was no moral danger or impropriety. Indeed, as they bathed and tended him, he felt as if he were seven years old again: the last time he had been so ill. He and his younger brother and sister had caught measles, which had turned to a lung inflammation. The little ones died first. As he tossed and turned in delirium, his parents had prayed all night at his bedside, dedicating his life to Our Lady's service if only he were spared. He survived the crisis, to be told that the Blessed Virgin had interceded for him so that he could live to become a _priest_. So his fate had been sealed, for who would defy _her_? Perhaps he should have died then…

"Do you recall what happened?" Saint-Loup asked.

"I'm not sure." His voice was weak, scarcely recognisable as his own.

"You were near death from wound-fever. And, perhaps in delirium, you had a bad fall, from the tower."

"I remember that…" Or had it merely been one of those dreams of falling, falling endlessly through space, to be jolted awake on landing?

"Anything else?"

His mind was a jumble of images and impressions, clouded by the bouts of delirium: the gypsy girl – Quasimodo – his brother – the gallows in the Grève – the hag in the Trou-aux-Rats… All a bad dream. He knew he had been given the _Viaticum_.

"The Body… I have received the Body… and the unction." That mattered, at least: his sins were absolved, and his soul was at peace for the present.

"So all you need to do now is rest, and regain your strength. It will take time. Mother Sibylle has written to the bishop, so there's no cause for you to fret about your duties."

He had been negligent lately, he knew: so much else on his mind, illness… Oh, he would think about it later, the next time his brother came begging for money…

"That's good. And Jehan?"

"You don't need to worry about him now, dear," said Mother Sibylle. He was too drowsy to notice the catch in her voice.

"Quasimodo…?"

"The other clergy are taking care of him. I hear the king's men are pleased with him."

He smiled faintly and closed his eyes, the lashes dark crescents against his ashen skin. "Good, too…"

"He's drifting off again," the vowess observed.

"He'll sleep himself better," Saint-Loup said.

"Children do that. Poor boy!" She led the surgeon to the bedroom door, and showed him out. "It's just strange that sometimes in his sleep he calls out for some dancer – la Esméralda."

"That's the gypsy they were going to hang for wounding the Captain of Archers, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"What happened there?"

"She was released in the end. It was some sort of misunderstanding." She deliberately omitted to mention that the girl was living downstairs, with her mother and husband.

"I wonder."

"What do you mean?"

"Perhaps it was just a fight: the two men fighting over her, wounding each other. He'd hardly be the first priest to – Well, it's a thought, isn't it?"

Sibylle's eyes widened. The Archdeacon of Josas brawling with an officer over some gypsy dancer? The very idea! Still, it would explain his gashed chest.

They reached the foot of the stairs.

"Whatever the cause, he's making good progress, but it'll take months for him to get strong," Rogier de Saint-Loup said. "I'd say it was most providential that he fell: otherwise…"

"Otherwise the poison from the knife-wounds would have killed him?"

"Indeed. When first I saw him, I thought he wouldn't last the day, let alone the night. But he's a fighter: quite remarkable will-power."

"He certainly has great courage, poor lad! But still… to be calling for Esméralda, of all people…"

As chance would have it, the girl herself was passing the doorway at that very moment. From what she overheard – a fall, old knife-wounds, a brave young man calling her name – she could draw only one conclusion: the gentleman upstairs was Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers. After he had ridden off from the Grève, he must have fallen from his horse and re-opened his wounds. Oh, what a chance this was!

"Pierre! Pierre!" She skipped into the yard, where he had taken charge of Djali's lessons, under the fascinated gaze of Pâquette.

"What is it? Good news!"

"Yes! The best! I know who the gentleman upstairs is! I heard the surgeon and Mother Sibylle talking about him!"

He gave a start. "And… you're happy about him being _here_? Under the same roof as us?"

"Of course! It couldn't be better! _And_ she said he'd been calling my name!"

"Are you _sure_?"

"Yes! Isn't it wonderful?" She gave one of those excessively broad grins that he found among her less appealing mannerisms. "Despite what happened in the Grève, this _proves_ he truly loves me!"

"Well, if it means he's going to live…"

"Just think: if I nurse him back to health, he'll know for certain how much _I_ truly love _him_!"

This was a change of heart beyond Pierre's wildest imaginings. He and Djali looked at each other in astonishment.

"_Pasque-Dieu_! The fickleness of women! The fidelity of goats!"

Esméralda grabbed him by the hand and dragged him after her. "Please, please, please, will you come with me to see him? I fear I'll faint otherwise!"

If anyone was likely to faint, it was himself, he thought. "Are you sure this is _wise_? I very much doubt he's strong enough to receive visitors –"

"But Mother Sibylle said he was calling for me! _Of course_ I must go to him!"

Pâquette shook her head, and continued re-attaching cassock buttons. "Something about that young officer of hers, I'm sure! Making a fool of herself… I sometimes think we're the only people here with any sense!" she said to Djali.

"Meh!" the goat bleated in agreement, and settled at her feet, like a lion or a hound on a monument.

"Now, be a good girl, and don't moult on my sewing! White goat and black wool are a very bad combination! And no eating buttons!"

* * *

Esméralda ran up the narrow stone stairs, Pierre following anxiously behind.

"Do you not think he'll have the most dreadful shock if you –?"

"What? No! He's been calling for me! Mother Sibylle told the surgeon! I heard her with my own ears!"

"Keep your voice down! It's a sick-room we're going into, not a tavern!"

"I know! My poor love…!"

She knocked lightly on the door, and then – without waiting for a response – flung it open. A wounded man lay asleep in the bed, the covers turned down to his waist, with two of the sisters watching over him.

"Phœbus!" she exclaimed tenderly, darting to his bedside.

The patient stirred, but did not waken.

Pierre groaned, covering his eyes with his hand: this was too much to bear. He pitied them both: the girl and the priest.

"_Phœbus_?"

But it was _not_ Captain Phœbus. Indeed, at first, Esméralda did not know him at all. The adage that clothes make the man is especially true of priests: she had looked on the archdeacon not so much as a human being as some sort of malevolent _animated cassock_ with a frowning mouth, burning eyes, and not much hair. _This_ man was bare-chested, save for ointments and compresses, between which his flesh was bruised black and purple. Although illness had sharpened and hollowed his features, he was still young, and in health probably rather striking. He had several days' growth of dark, somewhat grizzled beard. Then she noticed his hair, or rather, his _lack_ of it – receding from the forehead into a now slightly stubbly clerical tonsure, only a few white-ish wisps framed his face on the pillows. She looked at him again, picturing him clean-shaven. She imagined him dressed in black.

She staggered back against Pierre, turned and buried her face in his doublet.

Sister Isabeau scowled, and raised a finger to her lips. Her voice was a harsh whisper: "What's the meaning of this? He's asleep! The surgeon's visits always tire him out!"

Pierre gulped, his arms around Esméralda. "Dom Claude was my tutor. My second father, almost. We _both_ know him well," he said.

Her expression and voice became more gentle. "I see…! That would explain – Oh, I'm so sorry!"

"Well," said Sister Catherine softly, "I suggest you come up again when he's awake. He's still very weak, poor boy: we almost lost him."

"Yes – I'm sure some familiar company will do him good when he's a little stronger," Isabeau agreed. "We'll let you know!"

And she ushered them out of the room.

_**To be continued:**__ A dilemma_


	7. Green Glass is not an Emerald

**7: Green Glass is not an Emerald**

_Certes, pierre d'aÿmant  
Ne desirre pas fer tant  
Con je sui d'un douz samblant  
Covoitoz.  
J'ai a nom _Mescheanz d'Amors.

(_Indeed, a lodestone  
No more desires iron  
Than I am of one sweet glance  
Desirous.  
I am named _Unlucky in Love.)

Gillebert de Berneville, _De moi dolereus vos chant_ (13C)

Pierre guided Esméralda – stunned, half-fainting – down the winding stone stairs.

Mother Sibylle, who had been seeing the surgeon out of the house, was waiting for them below, hands on hips and gaze disapproving. "Have you been disturbing my patient?"

"No, he was sleeping," said Pierre. "We were worried when we heard… He was my teacher, you see. It's… just been _quite a shock_, seeing him like that."

She scrutinised Esméralda's wan face. "Indeed."

"He fell, didn't he? From the cathedral?"

"Yes. Four broken ribs and both shoulders pulled out."

"But his chest?"

"The gashes were much neglected. He must have had weeks of fever and delirium. He _was_ dying, but Maître de Saint-Loup says he'll mend now the hurts are clean. But we don't want a scandal, Messire Gringoire: you _do_ understand? Knives and priests – especially one of his standing! His reputation _must_ be protected."

"Indeed, Mother," he said calmly enough, but she had only increased his concern. _Knives _– and Dom Claude?

Sibylle looked at the wilting girl. "Ask Sister Geneviève to make your wife a chamomile tisane: she seems quite overcome."

"Suffering distresses her."

"No doubt. Tell me," she asked sharply, "_is_ it Agnès or Esméralda?"

"Agnès. The other's just a nickname, on account of her necklace."

The widow gave a thin-lipped smile. "Ah. I see."

* * *

Pierre took Esméralda out into the yard for some fresh air, while Geneviève prepared her drink.

"I can't stay here any longer! I don't feel safe!"

"Not safe? He's bedridden!"

"But you _must_ protect me from him! You're my husband!"

Pierre took a deep breath. When it suits you, he thought. He said nothing.

"But you're _supposed_ to protect me!" she insisted.

He spoke quietly, rather sadly: "And if it _had_ been Phœbus lying there – what was I supposed to do then?"

She did not answer. She was impulsive by nature, thoughtlessly kind – as when she had saved Pierre or had given water to Quasimodo – but just as thoughtlessly cruel. She had simply assumed he would go along with her wishes: that was what other people did – what they were _meant_ to do – to mirror her own moods and desires. Sullenly, she threw herself down on the dusty yard at her mother's feet, alongside Djali.

Pâquette glanced up from her cassock-sewing. "So it's _not_ your Captain Phœbus, then?" she asked with feigned innocence: in fact, she had been listening attentively.

"No," Pierre replied. "It's Dom Claude."

She shrugged. "I daresay this is _his_, then, from the length… I've nearly finished the buttons. Djali's been a good girl, and hasn't eaten any – have you, my poppet?" She ruffled the goat's silky ears.

"Mother, I _told_ you what he tried to do!" said Esméralda.

"Yes," Pâquette said sharply. "But if you'd said 'Yes' to him in the first place, a lot of trouble could have been avoided." She asked Pierre: "How is Monsieur the Archdeacon?"

"He was near death from wound-fever and a bad fall – but they think he'll live now."

"Good… He used to talk to me at my cell window, sometimes. So troubled… He'd ask me to pray for him." She remembered him standing at the public breviary, when he told her that Esméralda was to be hanged; remembered the wildness and torment in his dark eyes – surely from this fever – when he had delivered the girl into her hands. If she had his cassock, he must be in his chemise and braies; or, more probably, stark naked, she thought, smiling to herself. In years past, she had flogged herself senseless for thus picturing him (and, indeed, many other young men, lay and clergy alike).

"Do you think I could go back into sanctuary?" Esméralda asked. "At least _Quasimodo_ knew how to protect me! Or home to the Cour des Miracles?"

"Thanks in part to Quasimodo, there _is_ no more Cour des Miracles! At least, not in the way it was," said Pierre acerbically. "They're dead – Clopin and all the dukes and lords of Little Egypt! So there is no safety there!"

She sighed. She had grieved for her friends among the _truands_, but not over much. "Or what about our cousins, the Pradons? Why don't we go to stay with them, mother? Anywhere but here!"

"I'd rather face them with a bit more flesh on my bones and better clothes on my back. They're decent people, and we have to reclaim our property from them. So we ought to look less beggarly, for we're not begging them for it."

"Property?" asked Pierre, impecunious but ever optimistic.

"One field, but they've been looking after it for me since Uncle Mathieu died last year. One of them came to see me in my cell at the time."

"Well, that's something!"

"But we need to find somewhere else to stay!" Esméralda insisted.

"'_We_'? Well, I'm happy here, so is Djali," Pâquette said. "We have a roof, a bed, and food. Pierre has that snoring old man to share with, but otherwise…"

"But I'm frightened to sleep here now! What about when he gets well enough to walk? To manage the stairs?"

"From the look of him, " Pierre said, "that's months away, if ever."

Pâquette absent-mindedly stroked her daughter's hair, much as she had fondled the goat's ears. "And with us in the one bed, he'd have to get past _me_ first…"

"So _you_ would protect me then?"

She smiled beatifically, like a Reims statue of a far more virginal mother. "_Yes_, my darling." But that was not _quite_ what she had meant.

Sister Geneviève poked her head around the door into the yard. "I've some good, fresh chamomile ready for you now, dear! Come in and get it while it's hot! You'll feel much better!"

* * *

Still one matter regarding his master's condition preyed on Pierre's mind: _knife-wounds_. It made no sense, given what he knew of the archdeacon; but then, what Esméralda had told him – of Claude stabbing Phœbus, making advances, even trying to rape her when she was in sanctuary – ran counter to all he knew of the man. But he knew, from his own experience, that if Esméralda felt her virtue threatened, she would draw her knife. She had been arrested for stabbing one man, although she denied the crime; and yet here was a second who had pursued her, who had also suffered wounds. Had _she_ wounded one of them – or _both_? He realised that he scarcely knew her at all. She was his wife merely in name, by a questionable, temporary gypsy rite – and only since January; indeed, for half the time since they had been apart, with her in prison or in sanctuary. He had to admit that the case _looked_ bad.

He decided to broach the subject on one of the rare evenings they were alone together. Pâquette was in the kitchen, on the fireside settle with old Geoffroi. She was reading (extremely) aloud to him and Sister Geneviève from a French translation of de Voragine's_ Legenda Aurea_. Pierre encouraged her to practise her reading: indeed, he had been impressed that she was literate, but then, her family had been decent enough at one time. The good sisters prided themselves on owning three or four books, all pious works; and he thought that the lives and martyrdoms of the saints should at least prove morally and spiritually edifying.

After a day's juggling, he had found Esméralda perched, dainty as a songbird, on a clothes-chest at the foot of the bed she shared with her mother. She had been rummaging through it, looking in vain for anything gaudy enough to make into a new costume for dancing. She always made him feel awkward, with her natural grace, even in the drab clothes she currently wore. He was conscious of his own gangly physique, all sharp elbows and knees jutting through threadbare doublet and hose.

He smiled at her. "I'm glad you decided to stay: there really is nothing to fear."

"Not yet."

"Not for months. We should be out of here by then."

"Good."

"There's just one thing I don't understand about Dom Claude's illness."

"What's that?"

"How did he get himself cut up so badly in the first place? I've known him for seven years – since I was your age. I've never seen him drunk, and he doesn't get into brawls; in fact, before you told me of all your trouble with him, I'd have said he was _insufferably_ virtuous. I just can't imagine him in a fight! For a start, he'd look completely ridiculous!"

"He wasn't in a fight." This she said almost casually.

"So you _know_?"

She turned her head away. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Esméralda, what happened?"

"I want to forget."

Pierre stared at her.

"What? Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Because _I_'m frightened now."

"Why? Surely you don't think _I_…?"

He gulped. He hated himself for saying it, but he could not put it from his mind. "I don't know; I honestly don't know."

"Why do you say that? How can you _think_ it?"

"You threatened _me_ with a knife on our wedding-night!"

"That was different!"

"Then there was the Phœbus business, and now Dom Claude… Well, _did_ you do it?"

"No! You _know_ me, Pierre! You _know_ I'd never –"

"No, I _don't_ know. And I don't know _you_. You fought _me_ off: you said you'd sworn to stay a virgin. All well and good: I trusted you. Then what happened? I saw you on trial after being arrested, half-naked, in the lowest whorehouse on the Pont Saint-Michel, with some officer stretched bleeding at your feet! What was I to think? Whom should I believe?"

"Me, of course," she said simply.

"I _want_ to, Esméralda. But if it wasn't you – who _did_?"

"He did it _himself_. Just as he stabbed Phœbus. He even showed me."

Pierre grew even paler than usual. "_Pasque-Dieu_…"

"You know I said that when I was in prison, he visited me and offered to help me escape? Well, he told me that while I was being tortured, he had been watching, listening; that every time I cried out, he tore himself with a knife… He bared his breast. It wasn't even bandaged: when he pulled his clothes away, the blood and pus – even in a dungeon, the stench–!"

"But that was _at least_ a couple of _months_ before he fell."

"Yes. So?"

"So, ever since then… If he'd let his wounds get so bad, for so long – Mother Sibylle was right: it must've nearly killed him!No wonder he's been doing strange things!"

"_Strange_? Worse than strange! He's a – a _demon_, not a priest! God, when he crawled all over me that night in sanctuary! His body was like a furnace!"

"That would be the fever."

"Does it matter?" Esméralda did not want to think of Claude Frollo as merely a desperate, desperately sick man, unhinged by delirium. He was her enemy. He was the devil and, as such, she wished she could forget seeing him lying upstairs, so pathetically _human_.

"I trusted you; I trusted him; and both…" He was thinking: and both of you _broke_ that trust in different ways. And yet, in different ways, he still loved them both dearly.

She shrugged. "Who cares about him, anyway? Horrid old priest!"

Pierre looked back across seven years to the kindly, earnest young man who had taken him in and educated him, asking no payment save occasional help in shelving and sorting his numerous books and manuscript rolls. He had learned French, Latin, some Greek; philosophy, scripture, some law and a little science: wonders of which he, a street-urchin of sixteen, had never dared to dream. He winced at Esméralda's words.

* * *

Claude was making steady progress. He was fully conscious now: indeed, without the recurrent fevers that had plagued him since he had injured himself, his mind was clearer than it had been for months. His ribs still ached, but the knife wounds were slowly healing and his bruises were fading from black and purple to muddy colours, through to blues and greens. The sisters rubbed his shoulders with soothing salves to ease the damaged muscles, but both arms were still very weak.

Mother Sibylle realised that he was recovering in spirits when she tried to feed him some of Sister Geneviève's mutton broth.

"Before I touch any of that, could you please tell me what day it is, Mother?"

"Why?"

He narrowed his eyes. "Is it a fast day?"

She sighed. "Well, it's Wednesday."

"Then it's a fast day." And he refused to open his mouth for the spoon.

She glared at him. "I _know_, you'd liefer be on bread and water, never mind fish or vegetables, but you need building up! You've been _far_ too sick, and your weight –"

"But if you knew the weight of my _sins_…"

"– Beside the point at present! You know perfectly well that the sick are excused fasting!"

"As archdeacon, I can report you to the bishop!"

She thrust out her chin, determined. "No, _I_ shall report _you_ to the bishop! I'm writing to him once a week about you as it is! He's _very_ concerned, but then you've been a pet of his these ten years and more! I don't want him blaming _me_ if you make yourself ill again!"

He frowned, and let her feed him, while she muttered under her breath about "young folk these days" and something about him being a "silly, stubborn boy".

There were still gaps in his memory, at the times when his fever had been at its height. Of the hours before his fall, he retained only hazy impressions: the sound of fighting in the Parvis; a boat on the river; a dream – surely it was a dream? – of Esméralda embracing the gallows, and the claws of the hag in the Trou-aux-Rats emerging from the darkness between the window bars to seize her. He remembered the cool air against his burning skin as he had stood on the gallery of the tower, straining his eyes towards the Grève, seeking out a white shape. And then – nothing until the fever had broken, leaving him helpless in this bed.

But this he knew: _he had desired a woman_, which was forbidden. He had struck down a man for her – a shallow swaggerer who meant her ruin – but had left her to bear the blame of it. And so he had made her pain his, as with every cry she gave, he had gashed open his breast, and made ready to strike to his heart… A mortal sin, but for her sake…

And neither awake nor sleeping, but somewhere between, he had seen and heard her again in the torture-chamber… His wounds had been on fire; and so was he, with pain and with desire. Hallucinating, he had taken the key to the Red Door; had gone, like a sleepwalker, from his rooms in the cloister into the cathedral; up the stair. He had reached her bed; had touched her, kissed her; had been in a frenzy of longing, not knowing what to do next. He had woken only when having his lights punched out by Quasimodo. He saw the girl standing over him, with a short sword gleaming in her hand…

Always, always his dreams had ended thus: with him at her feet, in desperation and despair, sweating, sobbing, aroused – and in hopeless, virginal ignorance.

He did not know if she were living or dead; if they had hanged her after all. If only he could be sure that what he remembered of the Place de Grève was merely a fever-dream. Something white at the gallows…

He had been unable to confess even to Father Thierry, when he brought the sacrament and the latest gossip from the cathedral. He had tried, but was assured that any sins preceding his accident that were still troubling him had already been absolved. And so he confessed only minor sins of impatience and frustration at his illness, and left the worst unspoken. He certainly could not tell these kindly matrons. No, he must bear his guilt as his cross, with the pain of his wounds: he shared it only with the crucifix above his bed, with its painted blood and contorted limbs.

Sister Catherine shaved his beard (to his relief, as it itched, and he could not easily scratch it because he had to rest his arms), and tidied his tonsure, taking great care not to cut his scalp with the razor. "It's a bit of a shame, really," she said. "It's not as if you've much hair to spare, is it?"

"A family trait, I'm afraid: my father went bald young, too." He recalled his father as a tall, reserved man, much like himself, always wearing a coif to keep his head warm. To a child, he had seemed old, but he must have been about his own present age in those days; he had died in his forties. It grieved him still that, by just a few months, his parents had not lived to see his ordination – which they had made the whole object of his life since his childhood.

"Well, we've got to make you look proper because you're getting a visitor, dear," Sister Isabeau said. She rearranged the mound of bolsters and pillows so he could sit comfortably without aggravating the pains in his ribs and shoulders. "Mother thought you were quite well enough to have someone in to see you."

"Is it my brother?" He missed Jehan, and was vaguely fearful for him: there had been some conversation he could not quite recall, in a boat; besides, the lad kept such bad company. But he was not sure that he was strong enough to cope with his presence. He recalled their last meeting: telling him to go to hell, and throwing his purse at him from the window. The boy must have spent all of that by now, and was probably in debt again.

"No, it's a friend – an old pupil of yours, Messire Gringoire."

"I see." Her husband, after a fashion… Claude shivered involuntarily.

"Have you got a chill, dear? I'll get you another coverlet!"

"No, thank you; I'm all right."

The sisters let Pierre in. "Master?" he asked nervously, then his face brightened as he saw that Claude was awake and sitting up. He looked more like himself now, his former student thought: still pallid and hollow-cheeked (almost as bad as the crucifix on the wall), but clean-shaven, and healthier than when he had last been on his feet.

He managed a weak smile. "Gringoire – it's good to see you!"

"Mother Sibylle said you were well enough for a little company. – Ladies, would you mind leaving us?"

"Very well; if you need anything, just give a shout."

They closed the door behind them. Pierre wondered if they would try to eavesdrop: he hoped not, because there were personal matters he had to discuss.

"How goes it, master?" he asked.

"I mend slowly, but still I mend. How is your wife? Alive and well?"

Pierre looked nervous. "Yes, she is." Small thanks to you, he thought, but it would have been cruel to say it.

"Is she safe?" Claude's eyes widened. They still appeared far too large for his gaunt face, but at least they had lost the unnatural brilliance of fever.

"Yes."

"Thank heaven! I had feared I had – I had feared they had hanged her! Oh, my friend, such horrors and fancies have plagued me! I was near madness!"

"Madness?"

"Or delirium. Tell me – honestly – have I been behaving at all _oddly_?"

Pierre was torn between honesty and diplomacy: "It depends. And since when?"

"Since Esméralda was in prison."

That confirmed what Esméralda had said, he thought. "Well, you _looked_ like a walking corpse at the For-l'Evêque, and that night we got her out of the cathedral, the night of the battle, just before you…"

"That's not what I asked. What have I been _doing_?"

He flinched. "Esméralda would be a better person to ask, but she – she doesn't want to see you."

The priest's heart leapt: "Is she here?"

He avoided a direct answer. "What I mean is, she's _afraid_ to see you."

"Afraid of _me_?"

"Yes – and I _can_ understand why. I _trusted_ you with her, master – with her safety. I trusted you as a friend, but you…"

"Oh dear God…" Claude closed his eyes and turned his face away. "Fever-dreams… I thought it was all fever-dreams…"

"You _were_ ill: I keep telling her that. It was the wound-fever. If she had known you before, known you as I do…"

"It began _before_ my wounds. Did she tell you how I got them?"

Pierre nodded. "But you were much worse thereafter. She said… she said… well, that you tried to deflower her."

"I think I went to her bed one night, yes…" He sighed deeply, and tried to ignore the pain it sent through his side. "But I swear on Our Lady's own chastity, there was little danger…"

"How so?"

He blushed faintly beneath his pallor. "Because I don't know _how_."

Pierre, already shocked, tried not to look even _more_ so. Claude was a priest, yes, and inclined to asceticism; but he had, after all, been a student first, and everyone knew what _they_ were like. "But surely at university…?"

"_Never_. And when I studied medicine, I avoided anything… _incompatible with my vocation_. I have frightened her, I know. I have wronged her. I have near killed her for it. But" – and he glanced up at the gruesomely polychrome crucifix above him – "as Christ suffered on the cross for us, I _have_ loved her! I have loved her to distraction! And I would have pulled down the world to ruin for her!"

Pierre looked perplexed: in the same way that some sounds audible to dogs lie beyond the range of human hearing, so such vehement passion was beyond his own emotional spectrum, affectionate in nature though he was. And in so many ways, Esméralda, pretty as she was, struck him as an unlikely object of devotion for a man like Claude. "But why? You're a great scholar, a philosopher, but she…"

Claude went on, relieved at last to have someone to trust, to whom he could unburden his soul: "At times, she appeared to me as a sorceress, a devil, a succubus to tempt me, such as came to Saint Antony in the desert. At others, she seemed the embodiment of all perfection; of philosophy itself. I believed that, through her, all the secrets of the universe, the _operatio solis_ – the work of the sun – would be revealed to me."

The poet blinked in astonishment. "This _is_ the same Esméralda we're talking about, who dances with a tambourine and a singularly gifted goat? _Not_ Hypatia or Catherine of Alexandria, or Héloïse of the Paraclete?"

He nodded. "She is the_ Tabula Smaragdina _incarnate."

"The _what_?"

"The_Tabula Smaragdina_ – the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus! Her name tells us so – don't you see? La Esméralda! You've seen the emerald she wears around her neck!"

Pierre took a deep breath. "You _do_ know it's not her _real_ name?"

It was Dom Claude's turn to look shocked and puzzled. "No, I don't."

"Her name's Agnès: Agnès Guybertaut. Her mother said so."

"What mother?"

"When you left her with Sister Gudule, because she hated gypsies for stealing her child – well, it turned out Esméralda _is_ her stolen child. They had matching little shoes, made of pink satin. Small world, isn't it? So she's not even a real gypsy: Gudule – or Pâquette, which is _her_ real name – is just a scrawny old doxy from Reims."

"God's blood…!"

"And as for that 'emerald' that gave her her nickname – it's only a green glass bead."

"_Glass_?"

He nodded. "In short, master, la Esméralda is a fake – as fake as a glass emerald."

Claude did not know whether to laugh or cry: either would make his ribs hurt hellishly. Suddenly he saw his situation in all its absurdity. His goddess of philosophy, half-angel, half-demon, had not merely feet of clay, but was made of it entirely: the basest, most commonplace _prima materia_, not transformed by alchemy, but merely masked superficially by the illusion of her art and by his own capacity for self-deception. He had made a fool of himself, marked his immortal soul for damnation – all for a street-dancer with a glass amulet…

But he was not alone in this: he recognised the bitter edge to Pierre's voice. "And yet you, too, love her?"

The younger man nodded. "For my pains, yes. Though I can't say I'd be fool enough to tear down the world for her. Still, it's ridiculous, isn't it? She's only ever cared for that popinjay Phœbus! _Pasque-Dieu_! – What's _he_, compared to _either_ of us? _We_ are men of erudition and culture, but he –!"

"– Is a satyr in burnished plate," the priest suggested.

"Very finely put! – _Did_ you stab him, by the way? She says so."

"Yes, I did: he was about to debauch her."

"Unfortunately, she rather _wanted_ to be debauched! Which is the whole trouble."

"I wish I _had_ killed him."

"At times _I_ wish you had, too! Horns suit Djali far better than they do me, I tell you plain!"

"But I thought you _preferred_ the goat?"

"Well, yes, but no – I mean, not _that_ way!"

"That's a relief! I was beginning to worry about you!"

"_What_?"

"One comes across such things in the penitentials: one has to know what to say if people confess such sins. I _was_ becoming a little concerned!"

Pierre laughed. "I daresay I'd be happier if that were true! Djali may be _caprine_, but she's far less _capricious_ than her mistress! Far cleverer, too!"

"But she _is_ a goat. You must always remember that."

"Alas, yes! But Agnès-Esméralda… Even if she is a fake emerald…"

Claude nodded, with a wistful smile. Come to think of it, did they not say that the Elixir, the Philosopher's Stone, could only be attained through purifying the coarsest _prima materia_? Was it, perhaps, possible that she could be purified, ennobled into something finer? _Quod est Inferius est sicut quod est Superius_, said Hermes: the lower and the higher are one and the same. And yet – so far she had already cost him his health, almost his life, his self-respect… Why did his brother never have these problems with women? He was only Esméralda's age…

"Have you seen Jehan about at all while I've been ill? I sent him away with a flea in his ear, but he must have run out of money again by now!"

"No, he –" He pulled himself up sharply. "You've forgotten, then? Or you don't know?"

"What is it? Has something happened to him?"

"You remember there was the fighting at the cathedral, don't you – all that night, before you…?"

"A little. The fever was upon me."

The poet put his head in his hands. "I'm afraid Jehan was caught up in it, among the _truands_. He… _fell_."

"Wounded – or killed?"

"Slain. I'm so very sorry." He could not tell him that Jehan had been the lad whose brains he had seen Quasimodo dashing out against the Gallery of the Kings… Some things were best left unsaid.

Claude groaned. He had had a vague recollection of being in a boat on the river at night, with Pierre, Esméralda and the goat. Pierre had said something, but he could not quite remember what, his mind fogged by fever and the spasms that the action of rowing had sent across his inflamed chest.

"I told him to become a _truand_, and threw the purse from the window… '_Quid fecisti? Vox sanguinis fratris tui clamat ad me de terra_…'"*

"It's my fault, too," Pierre said, reflecting on the strategy that had misfired so terribly. He had not expected the bell-ringer to misunderstand so badly – to be so deadly a foe to Esméralda's friends.

"For sixteen years – ever since our parents… God forgive me, I was meant to protect him… And now I have no brother…" He began to break down.

Pierre clasped his hand. "That's _not_ true," he said firmly. "While I live and breathe, you will _always_ have a brother."

* * *

* "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me from the earth" – Genesis 4:10, Vulgate Bible (Latin translation attributed to St Jerome and used throughout the Middle Ages).

_**To be continued:**__ Three women's hearts, differently made_


	8. Three Women’s Hearts Differently Made

**8: Three Women's Hearts Differently Made**

"_Et vous, la gente Saulciciere  
Qui de dancier estre adestre,  
Guillemete la Tapiciere,  
Ne mesprenez vers vostre maistre:  
Tost vous fauldra clorre fenestre,  
Plus ne servirez qu'ung viel prestre,  
Ne que monnoye qu'on descrie."_

(_"And you, my well-bred Sausage-monger,  
__Who at love's dance has so much skill,  
And Guillaumette the Tapestry-weaver,  
Don't show scorn towards your master:  
For soon you'll have to shut up shop,  
Some old priest your only customer,  
Being no more than devalued coin."_)

François Villon, _Ballade de la Belle Heaulmière aux filles de joie_, from _Le Grand Testament_

Mother Sibylle nodded, her veils bobbing around her equine face. "Yes, he had to be told about his brother, but… was it not too soon?"

"He asked me," said Pierre. "I couldn't lie to him." (Well, not a _whole_ lie, he thought: never would he reveal _how_ the poor student had died.)

She sighed, and sipped her tisane.

"I promised him _I_ would be a brother to him, in Jehan's stead."

"That was generous indeed."

"Well, he's been more than generous to me over the years! You see, although my parents were people of substance – my father was tax-farmer for Gonesse – I was left with nothing when they were killed in the siege."

"Ah, yes. That was the year before the pestilence." She dated most events in relation to her own loss.

"So I was alone, six years old, and forced to fend for myself. For ten years, I raised myself on the streets, living on my wits. I couldn't settle to a trade, or to soldiering or religion. I had a notion to teach, since I'd failed at everything else, but I couldn't read or write. I took my troubles to the archdeacon, thinking he might advise me how to find a teacher. Instead, he offered to educate me himself." He smiled wryly. "Now I'm a man of letters, and can write plays that no-one wants to watch, and poems no-one wants to read."

"– And borrow my chairs for balancing acts with stray cats?" she interjected drily.

He grinned: "One must eat! – But you see, through all the vagaries of fortune, I have a store of knowledge in my head – however ill I remember it – and that is Dom Claude's doing!"

"And what of _your wife_?"

"Yes, well, of course he knows her, too."

"He called for her when he was delirious – _by her nickname_."

"Oh, I daresay that was something about Hermes Trismegistus and the Emerald Tablet," he said, with a feigned air of authority (hoping she would accept that explanation). "Emeralds have profound mystical significance for him, I think – but that's a part of his philosophy he thought too esoteric to share with me in full. The higher levels of hermetics are beyond even my erudition."

Mother Sibylle gave one of her tight, forced smiles. "But you must surely know that emeralds protect against the sin of _lust_? There's the miraculous ring of Saint Agnes, for example – your wife's name-saint."

Pierre gawped. "_Really_?"

"Young men _are_ easily tempted, whatever their estate. And _I_ wasn't born yesterday… Speak plainly, Messire Gringoire: _has_ Dom Claude put horns on you?"

"No, but…"

"_But_?"

He squirmed, and fiddled with the sleeves of his doublet. He did not want to betray either Claude or Esméralda. "He's my oldest and dearest friend…"

The widow fixed him with a gaze sharp as Pâquette's sewing needles. "Doubtless Arthur said the same of Lancelot."

"No, no… What I mean is…" He stared down at his worn shoes, and mumbled: "_She_ wouldn't have _him_."

"You mean he _tried_?"

He nodded, still scrutinising the broken stitching on the pikes of his shoes.

"He's suffered the torments of Hell. I nursed him through his fever: he spoke wildly of desire and sin, always with her name on his lips…"

"It wasn't requited."

She sniffed. "Hm. Just as well. Just as well… Thank you, messire."

* * *

Claude lay with his eyes closed. He was almost nineteen again, running on long legs in panic and despair from his College of Lisieux, up the Grande Rue Saint-Jacques, across the Île de la Cité, and on to the right bank – home, home to the Rue Tirechappe, his gown flying out behind him.* He passed corpses on carts, and the strange, masked faces of the plague-doctors. They tried to stop him entering the house, but he pushed past, heedless of the danger. On the table downstairs two bodies lay side by side, stitched into their shrouds, ready to be loaded on to the burial cart. In the late summer heat, he could already smell decay.

"But there's a child – a baby! Where's my brother?"

In his cradle, in soiled swaddling bands, the little mite was whimpering from thirst, like an abandoned puppy. He snatched him up under his arm, as if he were a rather awkward volume.

_Just the two of us left, little Jehan: the last of the Frollos._

_Just the two of us…_

No more.

He wished that he himself had died falling from the tower, dashed to pieces on the stones below; or from the fever that had wasted his flesh and left him as feeble as the infant in the cradle. What little merriment and laughter he had known had been Jehan's gift. Life without him – spoilt, foolish, improvident, but always loved – would be desolate.

He heard the rustle of woollen skirts, the rattle of prayer beads at the belt: the sound his mother used to make when she walked. He remembered blonde curls, like Jehan's, swept up into the wired horseshoe of a bourrelet, beneath a starched veil; a soft, plump face, the mouth grown small and bitter with grief and prayer.

He felt only a raw emptiness, as if his soul had been scoured out of his battered body.

"I _know_," Mother Sibylle said gently.

He did not respond.

"You've lost so much, haven't you?"

He sighed.

She stroked his brow and his remaining hair. "And you feel quite alone. But you're _not_."

He opened his eyes and looked up at her. "My little brother…"

She nodded. "I'm sorry you found out so soon: I was going to wait until you were stronger."

"I ran from the college, all the way home… They were shrouded, for taking to the Innocents… And he was starving in his cradle… I took him to a wet-nurse at our mill…"

"I know, my boy. You've been a dutiful, faithful son and brother all these years: take comfort from that."

"What comfort?" he said bitterly. "My Jehan died unshriven: he'll burn in Purgatory!"

"So will we all, that are not saints, for greater or lesser time. But he was scarce more than a child: I'm sure he can't have _so_ many great sins to be purged!"

Claude almost choked. Gambling, drinking, whoring: at sixteen, the lad was – had been – already a confirmed scoundrel. He had even seen him drunkenly groping a doxy in the same low bawdy house on the Pont Saint-Michel where he had stabbed Phœbus. "You don't know Jehan!"

"Oh _really_?"

"But _every_ Mass I say shall be for him: in all the life that's left to me, _every_ Mass… I say them for our parents and brothers and sisters already. And I shall pay chantry priests to say them for all of us when I, too, am dead… which I pray may be soon."

"For shame! That's wickedness, to pray for death! Your wounds are mending, and a learned priest like you may yet do much good on earth for Christ and His Church."

"I am the worst of sinners."

"Aren't we all? Your humility's truly Christian, but our good bishop expects great things of you. Indeed, I shouldn't be at all surprised if he wants you to succeed him."

"But I have shamed my office – my honour – my name…"

"What shame? Misfortune and a cruel sickness are all I see."

He gazed up from the pillows, his eyes filled with a pain that transcended the merely physical. "The sickness is in my soul."

She smiled. "_Love_-sickness, you mean? The little dancer?"

He winced.

"I had guessed as much. I've spoken with her husband."

"And you do not despise me for it?"

The corner of her mouth twitched in amusement. "The Devil only sends the _worst_ temptations to the _best_ of men – Saint Antony, Saint Jerome, …and, I think, Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas."

"That's a blasphemy!"

She shook her head. "I merely mean you're in good company: you wouldn't have been worth tempting if you weren't so virtuous beforehand. So – you were tempted in your body, but you have suffered for it."

"I have mortified my flesh."

"So _that_'s the story, is it?" She looked at his healing wounds, then at his gaunt face. "I won't pry."

"Good: for if I told you all that has been in my heart, you'd be horrified."

She chuckled. "Oh, I doubt it! We've nursed many types and stations of men under this roof, some of them great sinners; harlots, too! I've heard stories that would make a man-at-arms blush… But I have faith in you, Dom Claude: you _are_ a good man, whatever fools say of your studies." She patted his hands: scholar's hands, long and slender, with a few old burn scars from his experiments. The bruises were fading, and the fingernails he had lost through clinging to gutters and tiles were growing back. "And _whatever_ has befallen you, I know you will _learn_ from it, because you are wise, too."

"Wise? I have been mad, I fear."

"If young men can't run mad for love, who can? And you _are_ still young – younger than I was, when my tribulation came: the pestilence – the same visitation that took off your parents… All I loved were gone."

"_All_?"

"All… Eight children I had living then, of eleven I'd borne, and my good husband, too."

He nodded, understanding. "There were several of us, too, but only Jehan and I lived past five. I was pledged to the Church because Our Lady saved me from sickness. My mother longed for my ordination, but never lived to see it."

"She would have been proud of you, I'm sure – though not _too_ proud, I hope. I took great pride in my husband and my children, you see: too much pride. That was _my_ sin. I loved them so!"

"I think my mother _dared_ not… She lost too many. I had our Holy Mother Church instead."

She looked at him. It was as she had thought: a child who had grown to manhood loving, yet never loved. "You know, my first-born would be your age, if he'd lived. A clever boy, my Philippe – not in your way, not with scholarship and books, but he worked with his father, and was doing well for himself in trade. He was my favourite, I'll not deny. Oh, I was too proud of him! But he was the first to fall sick. Dear God! And when I saw you lying in a fever… But you're brave and strong, and that will see you through your trials."

"To what end?"

"A good and Christian one, I hope, but not for many years! Besides, you still have your poor foundling to care for, don't you? I hear that he's thriving these days – so Father Thierry says, at least. What was it you called him, now – _Quadragesima_?"

"Quasimodo."

"Yes, that's it! – The bishop and the king himself praised him greatly for saving the cathedral from that dreadful mob of ruffians! You still have _him_: that, at least, is a consolation."

"Ah, yes, I do…" Claude sighed – thanks to the effects of shock and fever, mercifully oblivious to the irony.

* * *

Pâquette had been re-reading de Voragine's account of her daughter's name-saint. Agnes of Rome, at the age of thirteen, refused the hand of a noble, though pagan suitor. She was thrown into a brothel, but her hair grew to hide her nakedness. She was to be burned for sorcery, but the fires burned her persecutors, leaving her untouched. She was run through with a sword, but even after death she still wrought miracles of chastity. A priest, Paul, who had sought leave to marry was given an emerald ring by the Pope, who told him to place it on the finger of her statue: wedded to the dead saint, his carnal desires left him.

A wretched bridal-bed, she thought. She compared the cold stones on which she had lain with Christ the Bridegroom with the miniver-lined coverlet of the Vicomte de Cormontreuil, to whom she had given herself when she was scarce older than Saint Agnes. She struggled to accept the logic of the virgin martyrs in the book. Why _was_ surrendering one's maidenhead deemed worse than parting with various other body parts – eyes, tongue, paps (as if the hurts she had done her own were not bad enough!) – not least one's _actual_ head? The memories that returned to her ever more vividly and tormentingly, as she began to regain strength, gave the lie to this teaching.

To prefer death would be to wish away her own Agnès, the fruit of her sin. Besides, she had repented: fifteen years' privations and penance, struggling with her thoughts and lacerating her body, had surely wiped clean a mere six years of harlotry. She thought, too, of the good Sisters of Saint Anne: their marriages and accouchements had not disbarred them from attaining a holy life in widowhood.

And yet her Agnès was even more perverse than any virgin martyr. It was _not_ that she had sought death before unchastity, merely death before unchastity _with anyone other than Phœbus de Châteaupers_, which was hardly saintly, given _his_ reputation. Meanwhile, the Archdeacon of Josas lay weak as a fledgling fallen from his nest, and the silly jade was already fretting about him being a danger to her.

To have driven a man like that mad for love of her – a man with position and property, to say nothing of his learning and his looks… (Pâquette recalled Dom Claude standing with his head bowed over the public breviary beside her cell, tall and elegant as a carved saint on Notre Dame of Reims, yet not at all made of stone – his eyes and lips afire.) She had thought the like only happened in the romances of Tristan or of Lancelot. Once, at a fair in Reims, she had heard a minstrel from the South tell of some long-ago poet who had run mad for a lady called the She-Wolf, and had dressed in wolf-skin, and so been hunted by her hounds… The priest – even if he had done only half of what Agnès had claimed – had been no less distracted than this Vidal, or whatever he was called.

Even as the folly of it appalled her, she was jealous: she had never inspired such a passion in any man. A drink, a laugh, a smile, a tumble on the mattress (or wherever was convenient), paid for in coin or jewellery – but never blood and torment, and vows of love or death. Yet the girl cared only for that swaggering Captain of the Archers, who had clearly thought no more of her than of any of his other cheap little harlots.

As a distraction, she began to teach her daughter needlework. Agnès had known enough only to keep her own clothes in repair, not the fine work for which ladies and gentlemen were willing to pay well. Using scraps from the charity box, she showed her how to embroider with silks and beads, but the girl was impatient. Wasp-like, always wanting to buzz about, she was not accustomed to any activity that required sitting still for any length of time. Every few minutes, she would spring up and begin to walk around, or practice a dance-step.

"_Why_ must I learn all of this, mother?" she asked in frustration.

"Because you won't be able to dance in the streets all your life."

"Why not?"

"Bloom fades soon on the streets – I know. And because we're kin to the Pradons, who are well-respected people. You need a real skill or trade, not kicking and twirling, showing yourself all naked beneath your skirts."

The girl's eyes flashed with insolence. "Not like _your_ trade, then?"

"I want better for you, can't you see that? Or a better protector, if you won't play wife to poor Pierre, good lad though he is!"

"But he isn't a knight!"

"Knights aren't the _only_ men worth having."

"I'm not sure I like your meaning, mother."

"Indeed. In Reims, some of the grand churchmen dressed their paramours like duchesses. They live well – bishops especially. And _archdeacons_."

Agnès-Esméralda pouted her red lips. "I think I like it even less."

"Knights get themselves slain in wars or duels, and then where are you? It's not as if the likes of us could ever be a lawful wife to such men, to be left with a dower of gold or land."

"But I wanted none of that! Only to be loved by him!"

Pâquette frowned. "More fool you, then! A girl with no fortune to hoist her chemise for free? He'd have got you with child, and turned on his heel faster than his horse, without giving you so much as a _denier_!"

"Don't judge Phœbus by the shabby way men used you!"

"As I've said before: my men _paid_. Phœbus would have let you hang – perhaps me, too, from the way that wretch Henriet handled us both! Admit it!"

"That wasn't his fault!"

"No? When you called his name and got us both near killed, your pretty captain rode on his pretty way, without so much as a pretty backward glance – just as he was willing to let you hang for his murder, though he was alive."

"He _was_ wounded."

"He was _betrothed_ – and to a wealthy young lady: do you think he'd risk all that for you? At least priests don't have _earthly_ brides!"

"That's an even greater sin."

Pâquette shrugged her thin shoulders (still bandaged beneath her gown). "Most pleasures are sin, especially for us women. But that's why we have penance and absolution, so they can be wiped away. I spent fifteen years in a cell, praying and starving and flogging myself, all to win you back. And since I've found you – well, God and His blessed Mother must have forgiven me!"

"But that doesn't mean you should return to it afterwards!"

"Are you _sure_ it was _thieves_ and not _nuns_ who raised you, child? For I'm sure those aren't the morals of the Cour des Miracles!"

"All I wanted was a fine young gentleman to love me!"

"You _had_ a fine young gentleman – rich and powerful and learned – throwing himself, weeping and bleeding, at your feet, and what do you do but drive him mad by denying him even a little 'mercy'?"

Her daughter gasped. "'_Young_ gentleman'? He's an _old man_! What is he –_ thirty-five_?" (Like most sixteen-year-olds, she regarded anyone past thirty as almost senile.)

Pâquette's mouth hardened. "Yes: he's about _my_ age: in his prime, I'd say! And such an innocent that I've seen him cross himself if so much as a pretty woman's _shadow_ crossed his path as he walked in the Grève! You could have led him by the nose as easily as Djali – strung him along on promises, without giving away even a kiss, if you'd been so minded!"

"But he's _ugly_!" She knew this was untrue, but still it was what she told herself, for he had _seemed_ ugly then, ugly in his deeds, scowling and cursing her from beneath his black hood, or falling upon her, gaunt and writhing and sweating in his chemise, that terrible night.

"What? It's true he hasn't much hair, but he's tall, and broad-shouldered and small-hipped as a man should be. And such eyes! God's blood, a man with eyes like that oughtn't to be a priest in the first place! It's a devilish waste, and a cruel temptation!"

"Well, if _you_ think he's such a catch, why don't _you_ –?" She could not bring herself to complete the thought.

Her mother shrugged again. "Oh, I might, if I had my beauty back again! And maybe even without it…"

"You _can't_ mean that!"

"Why not? At least he wouldn't be troubling _you_, then, would he?"

Esméralda twisted her face in disgust. "After all he did to me! All he _tried_ to do!"

"He'd have needed you to _show_ him!" She chuckled. "Dear God, talk of the blind leading the blind…! You want to be safe from him, don't you?"

"Yes, but …"

"Well, here's a serious plan," said Pâquette. "You already have a husband, haven't you?"

"Not _really_."

"Then make it 'really': marry him _properly_. None of these broken jugs and four-year contracts!"

"I saved his neck, then he saved mine, so the debt between us is paid. I don't _love_ him!"

"So what? This is _marriage_ we're talking about, _not_ love: that can come later, if ever."

"But they've been friends for years: that's why Pierre took Djali and left me with him! I could kick him for that!"

"And that's why your safety lies in him, because he wants no harm to _either_ you _or_ Dom Claude. Carry on with this Phœbus nonsense, and you'll drive him away!"

The girl sniffed. "I'm not sure I'd miss him much. He looks like a mop, with string for hair, and talks lots of nonsense about poetry and philosophy."

"He's an interesting lad, if you'd listen to what he says! _Djali_ would miss him greatly. I think that goat's a better judge of people than you are!"

"She's just got used to being spoilt." (Much like you, Pâquette thought, but did not say.) "He _has_ become quite a good juggler, though. The audience seems to like him."

"See? He has his uses!"

"I suppose so…" she said with a sigh. "So what would I have to do, then?"

"Just find yourself an understanding priest." And she added mischievously: "There's one upstairs…"

Esméralda threw down her sewing and stormed off.

Pâquette shook her head, and continued embroidering. Sometimes she wondered whether she would have done better to keep the gypsy changeling who had been left in her daughter's place: assuredly, he could not have been much more half-witted. But he must be long dead now, she thought; no-one in Reims would have wanted such an accursed-looking brat. The poor little wretch had probably been thrown in the Vesle. Still, he would have been unlikely to reach manhood anyway, all twisted up as he was.

_**Next chapter:**__ Esméralda returns to Notre Dame, and meets a man of consequence_

_

* * *

_

*The Rue Tirechappe was between the Rue Béthisy and the Rue Saint-Honoré (on the site of the modern Rue du Pont-Neuf between the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Saint-Honoré). Since the College de Lisieux (also known as Torci or Torchi) was on the Rue Saint-Étienne, near the Porte Saint-Jacques, Claude had had to run right across the city to get home.


	9. A Man of Consequence & A Woman of None

**9: A Man of Consequence & a Woman of None**

…_Ubi est antiquus__  
meus amicus?  
Hinc equitavit,  
eia, quis me amavit?_

(…_Where is my lover  
of former time?  
He's ridden from here,  
Alas! Who shall love me?_)

Anon. 12-13C, _Floret silva nobilis_ (_Carmina Burana_ MS)

After sleeping on it, Esméralda conceded that her mother might have a point, after all. She ought to discuss the matter with a priest – a _safe_ one, perhaps the little man who came to the house with the Host for the invalid archdeacon and Old Geoffroi. He might, at the very least, be able to tell her whether or not she _was_ really married.

Pierre was in the yard, brushing Djali, despite interruptions from young Simon (mostly in the form of loud swearing) while he cleaned the hen-house, and from Pâquette, who was doing more sewing. As far as Esméralda could tell, her mother was always pestering him with pointless questions on useless subjects. She hoped she was not flirting with him: that would be indecent in such an _old_ woman, although she _was_ beginning to look slightly less cadaverous these days.

"So whose idea was that, then, about beauty on the outside showing beauty on the inside?" Pâquette asked in a sceptical tone.

"Plato, if I recall aright."

"Who's he?"

"A Greek philosopher. One of the wisest, along with Aristotle. He teaches that the beauty of the outward form reflects what lies beneath."

That's obvious, Esméralda thought: it was just common sense, and didn't need any kind of fancy Greek name attaching to it.

"He's a fool, then!" said her mother, with a frown. "I don't care how wise you say he is!"

"_Was_."

"I mean, he hadn't met some of my old customers! The two things don't always go together."

Esméralda winced. Would she never be allowed to forget what her mother was?

"Well, I grant you, you have a point there, but it's not quite as simple as that! As my master used to explain to me –"

"–And much good it's done _him_, near killing himself! Is he any better today?"

Pierre sighed. "He's _broken_." There was no other word for it. "–But as I was saying, he used to explain to me it's a question of how one _defines_ 'beauty'. One could, of course, consult Aristotle –"

Esméralda cleared her throat and interrupted. "Pierre, you won't forget to give Djali's hooves a good polish, will you?"

He glanced up at her with a show of merriment. "Forget her _hooves_? The daintiest hooves that ever trod cobblestone? How _could_ I?"

Djali bleated haughtily, confident of her own charms.

"Now, this goat," he said to his mother-in-law, "_this_ goat is a fine example of Plato's thinking: a creature who embodies beauty and virtue in every aspect – appearance and character!"

"Not quite," Pâquette said. "She ate one of Sister Catherine's stockings from the laundry yesterday."

"– Apart from her tendency towards gluttony, then! If there is a Platonic ideal of goathood, of essential _capritas_, or perhaps _capritudo_, to coin a phrase – yes, I think I prefer _capritudo, _with _capritudinis_ in the genitive, to decline like _pulchritudo_ – then surely Djali measures up –"

Esméralda rolled her eyes, but Pâquette narrowed hers, noticing that her daughter was dressed quite respectably, for going out. "Where are _you_ off to, my girl?"

"I'm taking your advice. I'm going to see a priest."

Pierre looked puzzled. Pâquette whispered to him. He shrugged, and continued to wax eloquent on the twin subjects of philosophy and goats, to both of which he was much devoted. Djali listened quite as attentively as the woman, with one soft ear cocked.

* * *

Esméralda breathed hard, feeling her heart race as she gazed up at the towers of Notre Dame. Since she had been living with the Sisters, the whole household (with Old Geoffroi on his sticks, but bar the archdeacon and whichever sister was sitting with him) attended Mass at Saint Christophe's, beside the cathedral. She regarded the mother church with foreboding. Bad memories… But she would be safe there now, would she not? The danger that had lurked within the massive stone walls now lay beneath her own roof. She shuddered at the thought.

It was impossible to believe now that, only a couple of months ago, the Parvis had been the site of a massacre. No trace of it remained. Indeed, even at daybreak, as Claude had clung so desperately to the guttering high above, and Esméralda and Pâquette had been dragged from the cell, the square had been cleared of debris and the dead. The corpses had been flung into the Seine, to be fished out and robbed of their clothes by those wretches who made their living as scavengers, under the bridges and along the banks.

She looked up at the great, sculpted tympana above the west portals: the Last Judgement occupied the central one, flanked by Our Lady's early life and enthronement, and by her dormition and coronation. The theology confused her even more than the ideas Pierre was teaching her mother. She feared the stern judge and the vividly-painted demons tormenting souls in Hell, and so she passed through the portal named for Saint Anne, over which her daughter sat in majesty, flanked by censer-swinging angels.

She crossed herself as she entered the nave, bright with paintings and sunlit glass, its numerous side-altars lit with candles. From the gallery of the triforium, an ungainly but gaudily-coloured figure gazed down upon her…

* * *

Quasimodo had watched as his master was borne away on a plank, apparently lifeless; then, he had turned his one good eye again upon the commotion in the Grève. He had wept bitterly, believing that the only two people for whom he had ever cared were lost to him forever.

A little later, after giving Dom Claude the _Viaticum_, Father Thierry had found the boy huddled mournfully in his room, poking at the flesh-wound which Jehan's arrow had made in his arm. He sent for a sister from the Hôtel-Dieu to tend him. He reassured him, making him understand that his master lived, and was being cared for. When Quasimodo asked after Esméralda, he said that he did not know for certain what had befallen her, but he believed that she, too, lived: certainly he had not heard of an execution that morning.

At first, Quasimodo rejoiced. But then, it occurred to him that he might be punished for having pushed his master from the tower. He knew his master was already angry with him for beating him that night Esméralda had summoned him with the whistle. It would be better not to speak of it to the fathers, he decided. It was punishment enough to think that his master was injured. He hoped desperately that, once Dom Claude recovered, their lives could return to what he perceived as their former happiness, before that night: the two of them, together with Esméralda and her goat. He was ignorant of the depth of the torment his master had endured since late last year. And he had no idea, in his battle-fury, that the armoured figure he had shelled like a crab and smashed against the wall had been Jehan, nor that the rest of the 'enemy' he had slain had been Esméralda's friends.

He was, therefore, alarmed when he was summoned to the Bishop's Palace, for an audience with Monseigneur the Bishop of Paris himself. Did _he_ know what he had done to the archdeacon? He had used the builders' stone, wood and lead to repel the attackers, and that might be considered stealing, which his master had always taught him was wrong. He feared the pillory again. But he dared say nothing of this to Father Thierry and Father Nicolas. They made sure that he was clean, and had combed his hair, and that he was dressed smartly in his official bell-ringer's livery of red and violet.

To his relief, Monseigneur Louis de Beaumont de la Forêt, stout and richly robed, received him graciously. And by his side there was a long-nosed, wizened man in black velvet, who looked much older than his sixty years. He was almost as bent over as himself, and moved awkwardly, having been partially paralysed by strokes of apoplexy. He reminded Quasimodo of a spider – an old spider, who had been reduced to four feeble limbs. His only adornment was a heavy collar of gold cockle-shells.

"The bishop tells me you are deaf, my boy," the old man said, taking care to speak loudly and with as clear an articulation as he could muster, given that one corner of his mouth drooped somewhat.

"Yes, monsieur." He was already on his knees.

"Half-blind, too, I see. And – _Pasque-Dieu_! – I fear, misshapen in every quarter! Yet, without you, I am sure that the royal troops could not have saved the cathedral from being despoiled by that rabble of brigands. You – and _you alone_ – held them off valiantly until the soldiers arrived. It was little short of a miracle."

"Indeed, sire," added the bishop, "I cannot but see Our Lady's own hand in it."

The old man in black nodded. "Assuredly a miracle, _Pasque-Dieu_!"

"Thank you, monsieur," the youth answered. He had not been able to follow every word, but he understood from their expressions that they were very pleased with him.

"Do you know who I am?"

Quasimodo shook his head.

"I'm acquaint with your master, since this past December. I told him I was the Abbot of Saint Martin of Tours, as, indeed, I am."

"That's my birthday."

"What is?"

"Martinmas. I'll be twenty this Martinmas, my lord abbot!"

"A patriot from the cradle, then, _Pasque-Dieu_! – But it's not as Abbot of Saint Martin that I wish to reward you, but as King of France, do you hear? _King of France_!"

Quasimodo gawped. He had only ever seen the king at a distance, in processions on feast-days. (In truth, he had expected someone of more impressive appearance.)

"On the great feasts, I hope Monseigneur the Bishop will be so good as to lend you to me, to ring at my Sainte-Chapelle."

"And leave my bells?"

"To meet some others – some _royal_ bells. Would you like that, my boy?"

"_My_ bells are Our Lady's."

"Indeed, and you shall still have the care of them, because you saved them and the cathedral from desecration and despoiling. But it is my will that you ring for me at the Sainte-Chapelle, when I desire it: _my will_, do you understand?"

It sank in that this was a command, not a request. He was torn. It would mean entrusting his bells to some other ringer on the feasts, and yet… _More_ bells? _New_ bells to ring?

"You have none great as my Jacqueline or Marie. And I have my Guillaume, and Thibaut, and Gabrielle, and even little Pasquier!"

"That's true," said the king, smiling crookedly, "but you shall tread where St Louis himself has trod, and you shall see Our Lord's Crown of Thorns. I shall introduce you to the canons there, and to the chaplain of my private chapel, Father Jehan. He, too, makes music." He turned sadly to the bishop: "But it's a pity this poor child cannot hear it!"

The bishop nodded, for the chaplain in question was none other than Jehan de Ockeghem, one of the greatest composers of the age, whom Josquin des Prez would later commemorate with his haunting _Nymphes des bois_.

"And a stipend, I think, in addition to his current salary. What do you think, monseigneur – twenty _livres parisis_, _per annum_?"

The bishop scratched his several chins. For a youth such as Quasimodo, it was a generous sum, but all the same, the king had a reputation for stinginess, and the boy had, single-handedly, saved Notre Dame from sack. "I should say _thirty_."

The king scowled. "Better make it _forty_, then, with _half_ the sum contributed from _episcopal_ coffers, of course. I'm sure you _cannot_ object to that!"

Louis de Beaumont sighed, but he was forced to agree. "Yes, Quasimodo: you shall have forty _livres_ a year, for life!"

Quasimodo knew this was a fine reward – but his needs were few, and it meant far less to him than having new bells to ring.

"He _is_ the Archdeacon of Josas's ward, too, so it's only right that the Church should contribute generously," added the king. "By the by, how fares Dom Claude?"

"He's with the Sisterhood of St Anne. According to Mother Sibylle, it'll be some time before he has the strength to return to his post. I've had to split his duties between the other archdeacons, both of whom are whining about it!"

"That's unfortunate!"

"Yes! He's a remarkable fellow: old Chartier ordained him when he was under-age – with papal dispensation – and he's been a protégé of mine these ten years! Mind, he's always driven himself too hard: I don't think he's been entirely well since last winter."

The king nodded in agreement, and gave a cough. "Neither have I, monseigneur! Neither have I! How these old bones creak…! Are Mother Sibylle's tisanes as effective as my good friend _Compère_ Coictier's, I wonder…" He turned back to Quasimodo: "You can get up now, boy!"

The bell-ringer staggered clumsily to his feet: with his knock-knees and bowed calves, kneeling was never comfortable for him. He felt dazed, dazzled.

The king shook his head at the bishop. "Oh! The lad needs a decent hair-cut! It's bad enough that he's as red-haired as Judas, and crooked, _Pasque-Dieu_! My Olivier shall attend to it. How useful it is to have a barber as one's _confidant_! But then one must always trust the man who holds a razor to your throat…"

"Very true, sire!" the bishop nodded. "And what about the cause of all this nonsense, that wench with the goat?"

The king stroked his long nose pensively. "Ah, yes: the so-called gypsy… I'll do what I can: I daresay it was her pimp who stabbed the captain. Well, that's a lesson to young men who dress far too richly for cheap brothels."

"You know we can't have anything that looks _bad_, sire: after all, her mother's practically a living saint!"

"The anchoress? Indeed, indeed… There must be no shame for her, nor scandal for the Church!"

Quasimodo could follow none of this, but he caught the word "gypsy", which lightened his heart still more.

"Hmm… _And_ I think some sort of additional badge of office is called for…"

* * *

And so, Esméralda heard footsteps behind her in the cathedral: strange and irregular steps, limping, but quick. It was Quasimodo. Over his usual livery of parti-coloured red and violet, embroidered with silver bells, he now wore a sash of brilliant blue, worked with the royal lilies in gold. Given his bright red hair (tidier than usual), the overall effect was startling, like that of full sunlight through the vivid cathedral windows.

"You've come back," he said in his halting, heavy-tongued speech.

"Yes, yes…" she said, nodding to emphasise her meaning.

"You're safe!" And he scuttled towards her, to embrace her. "I thought… I thought they'd hanged you!"

"No… almost, but no…" She squirmed as he hugged her tightly: he did not know his own strength. She was grateful for his saving her life, and defence of her virtue against that vile old priest; yet he had slaughtered her friends, and still she found him physically repellent. His whole form was proof that he was accursed. His face, pressed close to hers, terrified her, with one good eye, and the other, under-developed, half-buried by a warty growth in the socket. The Evil Eye, she thought. It went with red hair, so the gypsies had always told her, for it was rare in their race.

"I hurt my arm, but it's better now. And I'm famous! See what the king gave me?" He tugged at the sash, showing off like a small child.

She forced herself to smile. "That's very fine. Very handsome."

He sighed. "But not as handsome as the Captain of Archers."

She tried to be diplomatic. "Perhaps not, but very fine for a bell-ringer!"

"He wants me to ring the great feasts at the Sainte-Chapelle!"

"That's a great honour! I'm sure your master will be pleased," she said. Although the merest thought of the archdeacon sickened her, it was difficult to know what else to say: small-talk with Quasimodo was never easy.

"My master's not here. He got hurt, too."

"I know," she said. "He fell."

"I'm sorry now, though I wasn't then. He shouldn't have laughed at you." What did he mean by that, she wondered. He continued: "I thought they'd hanged you, you see, when he laughed. But the other fathers say he's getting better."

"Yes, he is." But she wished he were not.

"I'm glad!" He laughed grotesquely with his horseshoe mouth and crooked tombstone teeth. "Because I love you _both_."

"Please don't say that, Quasimodo!"

"Why? I-I do! He shouldn't have tried to hurt you, but… you and he… I _love_ you."

"_Love_?"

"Yes. Since you brought me water… _He_ made me steal you. But he raised me. I couldn't choose, you see. If I'd lost you both… I couldn't live."

"I understand, but –" Oh God! She had never imagined this.

"– But I know you don't love me… I'm not handsome."

"It's not that," she lied. "It's more that… I already _have_ a husband, you see. Sort of."

Quasimodo looked as surprised as his distorted features allowed. This was the first he had heard of it: never once had Esméralda spoken of a husband while she had been in sanctuary. Where had he been when he was needed? "Who?"

"He works with me – with Djali. You must have seen him: tall, thin, blond, looks like this!" And she sucked in her cheeks and attempted an impersonation of Pierre's stance and expression. "Pierre Gringoire. Yes? You understand?"

Quasimodo chuckled. " Oh! At my master's rooms in the cloister… He had lessons. Sometimes both of us together!"

Of course… She should have remembered. All of them were linked, all of them flies caught in one web. But who was the spider?

"Gringoire… Yes, he's kind. He was kind to me. I could still hear then, when first he came."

"Yes. He's a good man."

"But _he_'s not handsome."

"No, not very. He looks like a mop. You know, for cleaning floors." She gestured appropriately.

"_He_'s not handsome, and yet you love _him_…"

"No, I… I mean, yes. Yes, I do. I saved his life, and he mine."

"But _I_ saved you. And I love you. I have money, too, now. The king gave me money."

"Good. That's good! For you! But – I have a husband, and a mother. I have a family, in fact."

"I didn't know."

"Neither did I, until… A lot of things have happened, Quasimodo, not all of them good, but… Sister Gudule, from the Grève, is my mother: you remember her? So I'm not an orphan any more."

"Oh." She could not be sure whether he looked hurt or not. (In fact, he was remembering Sister Gudule, and puzzling how she could be _anyone_'s mother, least of all the mother of someone as beautiful as Esméralda.)

"I'm very happy for you. Are _you_ happy for me?"

He nodded. "You will visit me again?"

She glanced around, nervously. "Yes, of course. You're my friend." But she did not relish the thought, and if he sensed it, he did not show it.

She backed away from him, and lost him among the columns and the knots of worshippers clustered around the many shrines and altars.

She passed a plump, blonde girl of about her own age, kneeling in prayer before one of the many statues of the Virgin. Our Lady, with her serene painted face, wore a crown of gold and jewels, robes embroidered with threads of gold, pearls and beads: she shimmered in the candlelight. The living girl's clothes had a tawdry gaiety, but, on close inspection, were grubby and threadbare, and her eyes were puffy with weeping as she turned towards her:

"La 'Sméralda?"

She stopped. The girl rose to her feet. She recognised her from the Cour des Miracles: one of the cheap jades to whom Pierre had been offered when he was sentenced to hang.

"Isabeau, what's wrong?"

She sniffed, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. "A bellyful of trouble, no mistake! The old woman made me drinks, but I kept throwing up, so that's useless! And I don't trust her spoons: I've seen girls die of 'em!"

"You're with child?"

The girl narrowed her eyes. "Well, what else, stupid? That's all I need now… Who'd want me with a brat?"

"Where's your lad?"

"I've not seen him for weeks, not since the battle here. He's either dead, or in prison, or else he's run off."

"I'm sorry."

"So you should be!"

"It's not my fault!"

"_No_? You thought yourself so much better than the rest of us: showing all you'd got, but then coming on all virtuous and touch-me-not! And now all our lads are slain or in prison or fled – on account of saving _you_!"

She glared in grief and fury; Esméralda flinched. She had, indeed, always considered herself superior to such trollops; but she had never wanted any of this to happen, never thought that Quasimodo would rain down death on her people…

She recalled the youth with whom she had often seen Isabeau: he wore a furred doublet with hanging sleeves and absurdly piked shoes, and was usually drunk. She had never been sure whether he was a regular customer or her pimp. "But your lad looked as if he had money, from the way he dressed – a young gentleman, you said he was."

"Pah!" she spat. "_Gentleman_? Everything was cadged off a rich relation – even what he paid me… _if_ he paid. Sometimes I was fool enough to give him credit, for his pretty face and curling hair… The pretty men, 'Sméralda – don't you trust 'em, for they'll take all they can for nothing!"

"Well, I hope he turns up again!" she said brusquely.

She did not know what else to say. She wanted to get away from her even more than from Quasimodo. In Isabeau's reddened eyes and dishevelled hair, she saw her mother as a girl – on the streets, pregnant, friendless. She held up a mirror to her own origins, and – if she were honest – what might have been her own future; a mirror into which she did not want to look.

The whore laughed bitterly. "If he does, I'll make him pay, I promise you!" She went on: "And as for that Captain of Archers, why didn't you finish him off good and proper? I mean, Bérarde's not been right since she was with him before Christmas. It's forced her price down, so she can scarce make enough to eat!"

"_What_?"

Isabeau read Esméralda's expression. "You didn't think you were the first, did you? He likes 'em slim and dark, so she'd never put me with him, but he's _always_ taking girls to the old woman's!"

"_Always_?"

"_She_ makes a fair bit of money from 'im, for her Sainte-Marthe room, grasping old cow. But I don't think he's clean."

Esméralda could not speak. She glanced imploringly at the statue of the Virgin.

"So you think I shouldn't talk like this in front of _her_?" Isabeau gestured. "Or has he given _you_ the clap, too?"

"No, he never even –"

"And 'twas he and his men that cut out all lads to pieces in the Parvis. Even Clopin. Good old Clopin, they say he made a brave end, with his scythe! – So I don't know how you can sleep of a night, after all the trouble you've caused! _All_ our lads – between that devil bell-ringer and the pretty captain…!"

"I didn't _mean_ for it to happen!"

"But it _did_."

"I'm _sorry_." Esméralda held out her hand in sympathy.

Rather than take it, Isabeau folded her arms. "_You_ won't starve this winter; _you_ havea _husband_!"

_Husband_. Again. She recoiled as if she had been struck.

The harlot turned her back, and knelt again in prayer to the merciful Virgin Mother.

Esméralda saw Father Thierry leaving another side altar, where he had been saying Mass, but she could not face the conversation she had planned to have with him. She hurried from the cathedral almost running, back to Widow Dorel's house. Even with the archdeacon abed upstairs, it still seemed safer.

* * *

She found Pierre and Pâquette still in the sunlit yard, in an excited state. Djali, whose ability to sense the mood of her humans was unusually acute, was skipping about like a kid, sending the hens flapping in all directions.

"We have received a letter!" Pierre cried, waving it as a baton. "Delivered by a liveried messenger!"

"And sealed with yellow wax!" Pâquette added.

Esméralda blinked. "What is it?"

Pierre grinned. "As your husband, I took the liberty of opening it." He performed an elaborate bow: "My lady," he said, "it's your _royal pardon_!"

"What? _From the king_?"

"Signed and sealed by the king _and_ the bishop!" He showed it to her. It was in Latin, in an elaborate hand, and so she was none the wiser.

"What does it say?"

He scratched his chin, and put on his most erudite frown (copied from his old tutor). "Well, it's all couched in very legal Latin, but having had a grounding in law, I can say that it boils down to the following points, which reflect those I myself raised with Messieurs L'Hermite and d'Estouteville in the Grève. _Primo_, owing to questions raised over your identity, _videlicet_, your public acknowledgement, before the Provost and other officers of the realm and city, as the child of this renowned and saintly anchoress –" He nodded to Pâquette, who smiled as sweetly as her missing teeth allowed, and dropped a courtesy "– and thus _not_ being a gypsy, you are, apparently, _not_ a sorceress. _Secundo_, your mother's sacred profession" – Here Pâquette chortled, recalling her true vocation –"and her brave intervention on your behalf mean that it would be a scandal to hang you. _Tertio_, all evidence reconsidered, it is thought that the person responsible for the assault on Captain de Châteaupers was probably a _truand_, of sex male, by occupation _leno_* – _Pâsque-Dieu_! what a slander! – and therefore was probably slain in the attack upon Notre Dame. And _ultimo_, it is considered that you have discharged your penance regarding the charge of debauchery and prostitution," Pierre concluded.

"_Debauchery and prostitution_?" Esméralda gulped.

Her mother, most un-saintly, sniffed. "Yes, I know, dear: it must be disappointing to get the blame without having the pleasure first!" And it was a perfectly natural assumption, under the circumstances, she thought. There _was_ no innocent explanation for being half-naked with a soldier in a cheap house of assignation. "So, did you see a priest?" she asked.

"Yes… erm… No. No, I couldn't."

"Pâquette told me," Pierre said. "I know you only want to feel safe." He knew, too, though, that she did not love him, and that made him uncomfortable.

"Yes," she said with a bitter sigh. "Why is it that the only men who love _me_ are monsters, either within or without, and he that _I_ love may be… _false_?"

Pierre did not regard _himself_ as a monster; nevertheless, he, Pâquette, and Djali exchanged meaningful glances. Was Esméralda beginning to come to her senses about Phœbus?

"_False_?" Pâquette echoed.

Esméralda nodded. "I saw Isabeau in the cathedral: she says she's pregnant."

Pierre gasped. "Isabeau? Not _Sister_ Isabeau? She's far too old! I mean, they'd have to start a _new religion_ if she's –"

"No, not _her_: big, blonde Isabeau from the _Cour des Miracles_. She blames me for her losing her young man in the fighting… But she said Phœbus – _my_ Phœbus – had taken _other_ girls to that house on the bridge! Perhaps she's just jealous – she seems jealous, because I've still got you, and she has no-one now, but… I don't know! You've said, and mother's said, and even…" She remembered the words of a desperate man in a damp, squalid cell: something about a "wretched, swaggering imbecile". "I mean, _other_ people have spoken against him, but I don't know what to believe! Isabeau said he's made one of the girls ill. I can't imagine, but – but suppose it's _true_?"

Pierre put his arm around her shoulders reassuringly, and Djali nuzzled her fingers with her pink velvet nose. "Can't we forget about Phœbus for once, eh? The main thing is," he said, wagging the pardon in his free hand, " we are now free of the shadow of the law!"

"Except they still think I'm a whore!"

"There _are_ worse things to be," her mother reminded her.

Pierre nodded. "I think the occasion calls for wine! I'll tell Mother Sibylle what the letter was all about – the sisters were curious as a bunch of old cats when the messenger arrived – and we can kill the fatted calf, or something, so long as it's _not_ a goat!"

_**Next chapter:**__ Claude sees an old acquaintance in another light_

* * *

*_leno_: _Lat._, pimp.


	10. The Virgin & the Harlot

**10: The Virgin & the Harlot**

_Mea mecum ludit__  
virginitas,__  
mea me detrudit  
simplicitas._

(_My virginity  
plays games with me,  
my innocence  
undoes me._)

Anon. 12-13C, _Tempus est iocundum_ (_Carmina Burana_ MS)

To Djali's barely concealed delight (expressed through bleats which only Pierre could rightly interpret), the 'fatted calf' slain in celebration for her humans was the noisiest of the old hens with whom she was forced to lodge. She had ceased laying, and had thus outlived her usefulness.

Pâquette helped Sister Geneviève make a fine blancmange(1) of the bird, with almonds and rice. It crossed her mind that if she were a hen, she would be strangled for the pot, too – old and barren. Years of fasting had stopped her monthly courses long ago. What semblance of a figure she had owed less to nature than to the pads and bandages with which Sister Louise dressed her ulcers. And yet she was too young to accept hagdom: why were grace and beauty wasted on the likes of Agnès, who lacked the wit to use them to best advantage?

She stirred the simmering mixture.

"When it's ready, would you take a bowl up to Monsieur the Archdeacon?" Sister Geneviève asked. "It's very good and nourishing for invalids. And I'm sure it'll make a pleasant change for him to have someone his own age to sit with him. Catherine can come downstairs, then, and see to old Geoffroy."

An odd look flickered across Pâquette's eyes. "The archdeacon?"

"Why ever not, Sister Gudule? It's not as if you're strangers."

"That's true enough: he used to ask me for prayers at my cell – for years now. I remember him when he had _hair_!"

"Now, now! He's still got _a bit_! And he'd have more if he wasn't a priest!" Geneviève laughed.

"Black hair. As black as mine was, too," Pâquette said.

"I can't say I ever really noticed the colour… Poor man, he's suffered so much lately!"

More than you know, she thought.

* * *

With a coverlet over his knees, and his back supported by bolsters and pillows, Claude lay on the settle in front of the fireplace. Sister Catherine and Mother Sibylle had supported him in his first faltering steps across the room, unsteady as a newborn foal. He despised himself for his bodily weakness, his helplessness, on top of all his moral failings. How long would it be before he could climb the stairs again to his laboratory in the North Tower? How long before he could again approach the Great Work with the necessary purity of spirit?

Since Father Thierry had brought him his Book of Hours from his rooms in the cloister, he spent even more of his time in prayer. He contemplated Mother Sibylle's anguished, angular crucifix: its grimacing mouth reproached him. He remembered the words of Saint John Chrysostom: "_The root, and the flower, too, of virginity is a crucified life_"(2), and regretted that he no longer had the strength to mortify his flesh.

Someone tapped on the door.

"Come in!" Claude said, wearily.

Sister Catherine let the visitor in. It was a skinny woman in linen cap and plain gown – a new house-servant or a novice, he assumed – bearing a couple of bowls of food on a tray.

"Thank you, sister."

The women spoke quietly to each other: a simple hand-over of duties. Then, Sister Catherine went out. He heard her footsteps on the stairs.

Still the other stood, hesitant, in the doorway. Apart from Madame Roland's antique crucifix in her cell – with its stylised, almost boneless limbs, quite unlike the one here above the bed – Pâquette had not been this close to so under-clad a man for fifteen years. A handsome one, too. She gathered her nerves.

She stepped forward, forcing a smile, which showed the spaces between her teeth. "I've brought you some blancmange, monsieur: Sister Geneviève thought it would do you good!"

"I don't deserve all this attention…"

"Of course you do, monsieur."

He said a short grace over the tray. She added the Lord's Prayer in very bad Latin – obviously learnt by rote years ago – accidentally omitting a negative: "_et nos inducas in tentationem_". He did not have the heart to correct her, since she seemed quite fervent. (A later age would call it a Freudian slip.)

Then, she perched on the edge of the settle beside him, and helped him manage the spoon. His arms were weak, and his shoulder joints painful.

"Are you still very sore?"

He nodded.

"It's a miracle you weren't killed."

"No, a pity."

"Don't be silly. _I_'m glad you're alive."

"You're too kind."

And she _was_ kind: one arm around his back, the other supporting his arm. He ate as much as he could: more than he had managed for a few days. She must have been a good mother, he thought.

"There! That's well done, monsieur! I'll have mine now, if it's not gone cold!"

He watched her closely while she ate. At first, with her grey hair sticking out from her cap, her missing teeth, and stiff-jointed movements, he had thought her past fifty, but he realised he was wrong. Her features were fine; the skin, drawn tight over the bones, was not much lined. Her eyes were large, with long, dark lashes. She was, like himself, still young, but had been ill. She had been a beauty.

This disturbed him. He felt safe with old women: below middle-age, he feared losing control emotionally and bodily. That was why he had shunned Madame de Beaujeu in December: he could not trust his own flesh near a beautiful young woman – even the king's daughter.

"I don't think I've seen you before, and yet I know you… your voice… Are you one of the sisters here?"

"Sort of. I've been here as long as you have. Nearly three months."

"That's strange…"

He knew that he had seen her before, but when or where? Memories nagged at him: incense, prayers, old Bishop Chartier in his cope… And then he thought of Esméralda in prison, gaunt and ashen: a certain tilt of the head, a curve of the lips. Perhaps he had been ill far longer than he realised, and she _was_ Esméralda, grown older; or perhaps his obsession with the gypsy was deceiving him, inscribing her features on the face of a stranger.

"Who _are_ you?" he asked.

"In the world, Pâquette Guybertaut, called 'Chantefleurie'," she answered. "In religion, Sister Gudule. You used to ask me to pray for you. Don't you remember?"

"From the Tour Roland? Forgive me," he said. "I had not expected – You look different."

She chuckled. "_Clean_, you mean. And with clothes on. _Proper_ clothes, that is, not that hair-shirt. Mind, Geneviève took half my skin off with it. After fifteen years!"

Yes, it must have been fifteen years, he thought, not long after his ordination. He had attended Bishop Chartier at the ceremony when she was walled in, as one dead to this world: a grief-crazed girl with long black hair and wild black eyes. Again, that thought…

"Esméralda."

"I _am_ her mother. But her name's Agnès."

"Yes, yes. So Gringoire told me."

"I know," she said bluntly. "I want to talk to you about her, monsieur. There's _a lot_ for us to talk _about_."

Oh dear God… He braced himself for an onslaught of accusations, to which he could only plead guilty. Attempted abduction: yes. Attempted rape: yes – _if_ he had known _how_, in the grip of delirium. Leaving her to face torture and death for his own crime: yes. Even if _she_ was a mere fraud, as Gringoire had said, a cheap, gaudy creature of coloured glass and tinsel, not the _Tabula Smaragdina_, _he_ should have known better…

"If you wish to avenge yourself upon me, sister, I shall not prevent you," he said quietly.

"Avenge _what_, monsieur?"

"I have greatly wronged your daughter."

"No more than _my_ daughter has greatly wronged _you_!"

Claude looked confused. This was not what was meant to happen; not how a devout and devoted mother _ought_ to respond to the man who had almost destroyed her daughter's virtue, if not her life.

Pâquette laid her hand gently on his shoulder. He flinched, and so she drew back, thinking she had caused him pain; she had, but not physically.

"_She_ won't apologise to you, but _I_ shall," she said. "She's treated you cruelly, and I'm sorry for that. _I_ didn't bring her up; if I had, I'd be ashamed to call her mine. And even the gypsies should have taught her better sense!"

"What do you mean?"

"For a man like _you_, to lower yourself so – to throw your heart and soul at her feet, to be trampled on, and her caring for no-one but a cheapskate rake of a soldier! It's a _shame_, monsieur! And it shames _me_!"

Moving his arm awkwardly, he rubbed his brow. "I – I don't understand…"

"I've tried to talk good sense into her: I've told her it was madness to refuse such a fine, learned gentleman, but she won't have it!"

"Then you're _not_ angry with _me_?"

She shrugged. "Well, after a _fashion_, monsieur. Your _manners_ could stand more polish where women are concerned. Nobles and truands alike may steal girls off the street, but I'd have expected better of a great scholar! You'd have had my blessing to court her properly, if you'd sought it. Mind, I'd have warned you plain that you were wasting your time on such a witless jade – which it pains me to say, being her mother! Why, she even looked down her nose at your friend Messire Gringoire, even though he is her husband of sorts."

"But… I'm a _priest_."

She assessed him professionally. His sufferings had only intensified his striking looks: the high cheekbones, the thin, straight nose – an ascetic face, but for those passionate eyes and delicately sensual lips. And, just as she had imagined, without his cassock, his body was well-formed: too thin at present, but broad-shouldered, and with long legs outlined by the fall of the coverlet. A pity that his chest, left bare by his unlaced chemise, was so scabbed and scarred, and smeared with ointment. "Old and ugly"? Oh, Agnès, she thought, damn you for driving him into this madness…

"You're a _man_."

He felt like a beast being valued at a livestock market. "And _you_ are an anchoress," he reminded her.

"Well, I _was_, until those wretched soldiers tore my cell apart! The front wall's a pile of rubble. I can't go back. And I _won't_, for God and His Mother have granted_ me _my prayers and given me back my daughter. I must thank you for that, monsieur, even if she can be a trial to me."

He gave a bitter half-smile. "Nothing could have been further from my intention!"

"Whether you meant it or not, you brought her to me. That was God's will!"

"But I meant for her to _hang_ – that I'd be free of her torment! Don't you see? I made her choose: the gallows or me. _She chose the gallows_. She even put her arms around it!" Esméralda clasping the gibbet – Esméralda gripped in the anchoress's claws: these were the last events he remembered before his fall.

Pâquette muttered something that sounded like "damn fool", but Claude did not catch the endings to be sure whether she meant him or the girl. "Well, yes, I _know_ what she's like: I hid her in my cell, but even then she nearly got us both killed, calling for that wretched captain!"

He groaned.

She continued: "And you should've seen the commotion – the guards, and Henriet Cousin with the noose all ready, and Monsieur Tristan and the Provost! I feared they'd kill me, too! I've never known a girl so stubborn – worse than her goat!" She shook her head. "And for her to spurn a man like _you_!"

He trembled like a snared bird. "But I am a _priest_. And I have committed terrible sins. Mortal sins. I could not confess them."

"Oh, Agnès has told me all about it."

"– _All_?"

"All that she would, and I can fairly guess what she's kept to herself. You mustn't fret! I know you didn't succeed with her."

"That's not the point. I _tried_."

"Aye – when you were off your head with a raging fever!"

"But even if I were not… I had visions of her in my sleep, tormenting my flesh so that – I should have confessed it – if you wake and find pleasure in the sin, you are meant to confess it – but I dared not! I've laid sinful hands on the holy Body and Blood of Our Lord; performed the sacrifice of the Mass in a state of sin, stained to the soul by the night's impurity, by the memory of lustful dreams! It is _blasphemy_!"

Pâquette pursed her lips, and sucked in her already sunken cheeks.

He continued: "I know that you, too, have struggled with demons in your cell; I've heard you crying out against them, seen you scourge yourself. But you know, I suppose, that there are demons that come in female form – succubuses? It must have been one of them that took her form. They lie with a man: they steal his seed, his very essence, in the night…"

She compressed her lips still further. Claude thought it was disapproval; in fact, she was trying to suppress what would have been her filthiest laugh. If he believed _that_, he was more innocent or ignorant than she had imagined. At last, with a choking sound, she got the words out: "No, they _don't_."

"What do you mean?"

"Monsieur… How to say… When problems – ahem! – _arise_ at night, it's… it's _not_ demons. Well, not _usually_."

"How do you know?"

She raised an eyebrow. "You _do_ know how I made a living, before –?"

"Yes, but…"

"It's _not_ demons: trust me, monsieur. It's nothing _unnatural_."

"Are you _sure_?"

She nodded. "You really _are_ a virgin, aren't you?"

He blushed faintly, and sounded defensive. "Why do you ask? Is it to mock me?"

Pâquette shook her head. She had done her share of initiating youths, so that they knew what to do in the marriage-bed. "Not at all. But it seems to me you don't know your own body very well."

"I've studied medicine and surgery."

"Not in that way. I mean, you _fear_ your body. You didn't understand what she was making you _feel_. And that frightens you."

"It's _sin_ that frightens me. I've tried to hide from women – as Jerome advises, '_I flee to make sure I be not overcome_'(3) – but the thoughts – Even when I sleep! If these are not demons of lust in woman's form, sent to tempt me, then what –?"

"They're _not_. You're a man: most men think about women and love-making, day or night. And sometimes the thinking or dreaming fools their bodies into acting as if a woman were really with them. You're still young and, until all this daft business" – she waved her hand over his wounded breast – "you were healthy enough, I think. So it would happen to you just the same as to any other young man. Except most other young men would just go out and get themselves a girl when they need one."

"I _was_ tempted."

"Sending your bell-ringer boy after her? Well, that was plain foolishness, wasn't it, using him to do your wooing? Any woman with eyes in her head would run a mile from _his_ face! _Not_ from _yours_, though…"

He shrank back into his pillows. "Temptation leads to fall, leads to sin… It is as much of a sin to commit adultery in one's heart, as in the flesh: I betrayed my vows to our Holy Mother Church."

The adage that crossed Pâquette's mind at this point was that one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb: if to sin in _thought_ were as bad as to sin in _deed_, then the deed was preferable, as it at least afforded some pleasure at the time and sweet memories after, and did not compound the offence with hypocrisy. She had come to this conclusion over twenty years ago, and its logic had survived years of meditation and agonising penance.

"But there's no redemption without sin. If the serpent hadn't tempted Eve, nor she Adam, there would have been no cause for Christ to come to redeem us, would there?"

"It's not _that_ simple. Tread warily lest you fall into heresy, sister: theology is a dangerous subject for the unschooled!"

"But what about the Prodigal Son? Wasn't he loved and rewarded more, after all his rambling and whoring, than the brother who stayed at home, being good, who had learned nothing?"

This struck a vulnerable spot: he thought immediately of Jehan. If only he could have his prodigal little brother back, faults and vices and all, golden curls and laughter… "But sometimes he is lost beyond recall."

"But don't you see? I was a great sinner, too, in deed, not just in thought. I got a child in my sin, and I loved her dearly, but the good Lord had her taken from me, so that I would be led to repent. And so I did my penance, so now, thanks to you, I've got her back!"

"But it really _isn't_ that simple!"

"_Of course_ it is! Vain little fool though she may be, she's still mine, and I'm thankful to have her back, for I was sure those witches had roasted her like a milk-pig! You should have seen the changeling they left me in her stead! God's judgement, no doubt, for my being too vain of her beauty, but it was a right devil's brat!"

"A _changeling_?" Claude had not heard this part of her story before. He was curious, and, in truth, he wanted to distract her so that she did not keep _looking at him_ so disconcertingly, as if she could see through his chemise, or talking about unseemly matters.

"Yes. It was a boy-child or, rather, a boy-_imp_! My Agnès was but fourteen months old, but he must have been four years old at least, for he'd teeth, and prattled in some heathen tongue. Hideous he was, all crook-backed and rickety and one-eyed, with red hair like Judas Iscariot! Oh, I was mad with grief, and even madder to see _that_ in my pretty babe's place!"

Claude knitted his brows. "And where _was_ this?"

"In Reims, monsieur."

"_Reims_?" Bishop Chartier had told him that Quasimodo had been sent to the foundling bed by the Archbishop of Reims (in those days, Monseigneur Juvénal des Ursins). Surely there could not have been more than one such foundling of that age there that spring?

"Yes, monsieur. What of it?"

"It is fate… A strange fate…"

"What are you talking about?"

"The little gypsy boy. A hunchback, with red hair and crooked legs, you say?"

"Yes."

"And with _one_ eye?"

"As good as: the other wasn't formed right, and there was some sort of wart over it… I can see him as clear as it were yesterday, squirming around on the floor, squalling and shrieking! I doubt he was quite right in his head, either. I'm surprised he'd not been drowned at birth, but they must have made money from him begging, when he was smaller and less rowdy. Still, he must be long dead by now: children like that don't make old bones."

"No. If it's the same boy, he still lives. I know. You see, there _was_ a child of that description sent from Reims for display as a foundling here at Notre Dame. He was adopted."

"Well I never! Who'd be fool enough to do _that_?"

Claude sighed. "_Me_."

"But you're about my age, aren't you? Not much more than a boy yourself then!"

"Barely twenty: I'd needed a dispensation to be ordained! But I was passing the foundling bed after Mass, and saw some vowesses – not _these_ sisters, but Haudriettes – poking and prodding the poor mite. They were talking about burning him alive. And so I took him home with me. It was Quasimodo Sunday, so he got a name."

"Quasimodo the bell-ringer?_ Your_ bell-ringer? But everyone says you'd grown him in a glass, with your chemistry!"

"What? Oh, I suppose he _is_ something of a _homunculus_! – But no, I found him at Notre Dame, and raised him, and taught him to speak French, and how to read a little. When the bells took his hearing and still more of his wits, just five or six years past, I taught him to speak again, with hand-gestures. I devised the system myself."

Pâquette felt a brief spasm of shame at mentally undressing the archdeacon. For all his tormented desires, the poor young man had real saintliness in him, a measure of virtue that she could never attain. In her cell, there had been a stone wall and iron bars between her and the physical reality of men, her thoughts alone to torment her. But what had she _done_? She had prayed, yes – and prayer was necessary to the world, to intercede for the living, and to help the dead out of Purgatory. But she had performed no other acts of mercy: not fed or clothed the poor, not mothered the orphan. Not for the first time, she wondered if the good Lord had left her the crippled changeling as a test of her compassion, which, in the selfishness of grief, she had failed. However, like Saint Martin with the beggar, Dom Claude had done all that a good Christian should. Still, he ought not to have such eyes, and olive skin, and a lean body…

"Well, that's a miracle!" she said "And _my_ girl gave him water, when he was in the pillory! But knowing no better, I cursed her for it then…"

"It was _I_ who should have been in the pillory, not he," Claude said.

"Don't say that!"

"But it's true! I scourged myself all that night… and most nights thereafter."

"Oh, I've done that, too, for years!" she said. "And with the hair-shirt on top, you should see the state of my ti– Well, _no_, you _shouldn't_! – But then, I've _sinned_ with _my_ body, whereas you – you _are_ a _good_ man! Only a _good_ man would care for such a child, and teach him –"

"A _good_ man would not have let him be humiliated before the mob for his own sins. A _good_ man would not let those he loved suffer torture in his stead: him for her abduction, her for stabbing the captain…"

"_You_'ve suffered _more_ than enough torture for both, by the look of you!"

"It's as I deserve. Quasimodo's all I have left, now. My own brother died in the fighting. I should not have let it come to this!"

"But there's Messire Gringoire, too, isn't there? He visits you. _He_ loves you as a brother."

He sighed. "Ah, yes… Pierre!"

"You should hear how highly he speaks of you, of all the lessons you gave him! Agnès scolds him for it! He's a clever boy: I hope he'll amount to something, and keep her decently. Not all this cat and goat business. That's just not right!"

Claude nodded. "I've said the same to him myself! It's a waste of his talent!"

"I've asked him to teach me what you taught him, but he says he's such a scatterbrain, he can't remember half of it! But so far, we've talked about philosophy and goats; or maybe it was the philosophy _of_ goats? It's hard to tell with him."

"That must be the _tragic _school of philosophy."

"Why do you say that, monsieur?" she asked in all innocence.

He smiled wryly. "He hasn't been teaching you _Greek_, then?"(4)

"No, monsieur, although I know the _Kyrie_'s Greek, isn't it? But I'd like to know Latin properly, for my prayers. And I'd like to know… oh, lots of things!"

"For what reason?"

"If you let a bird out of a cage, monsieur, it will want to fly. It needs to know how to fly, or you ought to keep it in the cage."

He sighed. "It seems to me that the sisters are better placed for teaching all you should need, as a woman: how to keep house again, to tend the sick, to sew –"

"Oh, I've always known how to sew! That was my first trade! Fine needlework, beading, braiding, to lay gold on a seam… I sewed and beaded those sweet little pink shoes for Agnès. I mended your cassock that you'd torn in your fall, and put the buttons back on. I didn't know it was yours at first; mind, I should have guessed, with you being so tall! That was easy, though: women's work – child's play."

_Women's work_… _Child's play_… Common turns of phrase, which he knew she must have used in ignorance – and yet they gave him a start. In alchemy, they have a deeper, symbolic significance: the simple but repetitive processes of dissolution and coagulation. _Solve et coagula_, as Miriam of Alexandria, 'Maria the Prophetess' or 'the Jewess', enjoined: _solve et coagula_, over and over again, to refine the base _prima materia_.

"Thank you for that," he said, somewhat distracted.

She smiled. "I hope you're well enough to wear it again soon," she said, while thinking, but not _too_ soon: she enjoyed the view through his chemise. "I'll let you get some rest now, monsieur, but you mustn't be afraid, whatever you dream. There's nothing wrong with you – nothing _at all_. No demons."

A strange woman, he thought: alarmingly garrulous, and just plain alarming in some respects; not much education, but no fool. And they were bound together by their children. Child's play, again… _Solve et coagula_…

* * *

"Where _have_ you been, mother?" Pierre asked, with mock annoyance, when Pâquette came downstairs with the tray. "Our celebratory feast, and the sisters spirit you away!"

"I took my dinner with Monsieur of Josas," Pâquette replied. "And we talked."

"About what?" asked Esméralda, apprehensive.

"Our children, for the most part."

"You talked about _me_ – with _him_?"

"Yes. I told him how sorry I was for all that had happened, and how unkind you'd been, for you _have_ used him uncommonly ill! Poor lad! He looks so frail – and he used to be so fine-looking!"

"– And what do you mean by _'our children_'? Who else?"

"His bell-ringer, your friend Quasimodo. Here's a funny thing, Agnès: the ugly little crippled boy the gypsies left in your place got sent to Paris as a foundling, and Dom Claude took him in! In a way, it makes him your brother, of sorts."

Pierre gasped: "Quasimodo! My adopted brother-in-law! Who'd have thought it?"

Esméralda turned pale.

_**Next chapter:**__ Meet the Pradons…_

* * *

(1)_ Blancmange_: in the Middle Ages, a savoury chicken-and-rice dish, like a risotto or thick soup, regarded as good invalid food (the chicken was often chopped finely or minced).

(2) John Chrysostom, _De Virginitate_.

(3) Jerome, _Contra Vigilantium_.

(4) Claude is punning at Pâquette's expense: the Greek root of the word 'tragedy' literally means 'goat-song'.


	11. The Spider and the Fly

**11: The Spider and the Fly**

_Vellet Deus, vellent di,  
quod mente proposui:  
ut eius virginea  
reserassem vincula!_

_(God or gods be willing,  
This plan is in my brain:  
From my love's virginity  
I shall unlock the chain!)_

Anon. 12-13C, _O__ mi dilectissima! _(_Carmina Burana_ MS)

"_Pasque-Dieu_!" Pierre went on. "Quasimodo, the conqueror of the Cour des Miracles! I may be able to make a curiously touching poem on this theme! Exchanged infants who meet again, all unwitting… Yes, it might make an epic in verse – even a drama!"

Esméralda ignored him (after all, it was simply Gringoire being Gringoire) and glared at her mother: "But you _apologised_ to _that man_!"

Pâquette gave one of her stiff-jointed shrugs. "Well, what would you _have_ me do?"

"Speak for_ me_! Condemn_ him_! You're _my mother_!"

"What is it they say about _gift-horses_?" she said in a low voice. "If the rumours are true, that he _does_ make gold, you could've gulled him for far more than that captain!"

"_Gold_? That's all you care about!_ My own mother_ would have me sell myself for gold!"

"One can't live without it! And giving yourself free to a _soldier_ usually ends with becoming _regimental property_," Pâquette countered. "No more than devalued coin!"(1)

Pierre's ears pricked up: "Ah yes! Maître Villon! Oh, to have his gift for words – though _not_ his career, I must add! They talked of him still in the _Cour des Miracles_…"

"Pierre, why won't _you_ tell her –?"

"Because I'd much rather discuss poetry! – You like poetry, don't you, Pâquette?"

"I like it well – all the songs my father used to sing when I was a child! There was one about a unicorn:

_Ausi conme unicorne sui  
Qui s'esbahit en regardant  
Quant la pucele va mirant …_(2)

If only I could remember it all –"

"Oh, that's an old one, I fancy!" he enthused.

Esméralda bridled. "_Poetry_! Pah! Why?"

"Why not?" said Pierre. "We can't undo all that's happened: we just have to live with it. What good could come of berating a sick man? He knows his own sins well enough!"

"You say that because he's your friend!"

"I can't forget that he taught me all I know."

"You forget that _I'm_ your wife!"

Only as a last resort, he thought; only now that she was starting to see the dents in Captain Phœbus's shining armour, and was still terrified of the archdeacon. Still he thought of that night at La Falourdel's. Yes, Claude had confessed to the stabbing. But _she_ had gone there, of her free will, telling no-one, to meet a notorious womaniser… As a wife, he might never be able to trust her fully; no more than he could now trust his mentor. He still loved them both dearly – and pitied them both – but it would take time for his faith in either of them to recover.

He got up from the table. "Very well. That pleases me. But please excuse me: I have a _goat_ to exercise." He bowed formally. "Good day, _wife_."

"She's _my_ goat."

"Correction: if I am your husband, she is mine. Faithful beasts, goats, you know: I can't think why they're used to symbolise lechery. _They_ defend their honour with their horns."

"And _my_ honour?"

He smiled sadly. "Have you looked for it on the Pont Saint-Michel?" He rubbed his temples. "I' faith, I felt my own horns sprouting…"

"But you _know_ nothing happened."

He bowed again, and went out into the yard, where Djali – munching on scraps – was waiting.

"Mother! What have I said? He _knows_ nothing happened! – This is _your_ fault, for fawning around that–that _monster_!"

"All you do is keep hurting him, Agnès," Pâquette said.

"How? When?"

"I told you it was dangerous to get love mixed up with marriage."

"But I _haven't_! I just want to be safe: it's not as if I _love_ him!"

"_He_ loves _you_, though: that's the trouble."

"_Him_? But he's… he's just _Pierre_."

"Yes. Just Pierre, who always wants to help." She sighed. "And we have to think of how we're going to live, and where we're going to live. And we need him for that. I don't want the Pradons to take us for paupers. Try to be kind to him."

* * *

If anything, Claude felt far worse because of what he misread as Pâquette's magnanimity. Had she struck him across the face, or cursed him, he would have understood it: outraged honour, maternal vengeance. But not this.

Had he been less virtuous to begin with, his fall would have caused him (and others) far less pain. A man of the world would have been spared it entirely, swiftly seeing through the glitter of glass and spangles, and would have turned his attentions elsewhere. But he had emptied out his heart, his soul itself, for Esméralda. Even if the object of his love had been shallow, foolish – Christ knew, it crushed him to admit that – there was nothing superficial in that love itself: the tormented longing, the exaltations and the abasements nailing him to his own passion.

He had blasphemed against his religion. Had he not told her that had she lived in those times, God would have chosen her to be His mother, in Our Lady's stead? He had mocked the Mass by performing the sacrifice unconfessed, after sinful dreams had stirred him at night. He had blasphemed, too, against science. He had sought the Philosopher's Stone, but had let a tawdry piece of glass beguile him from his quest. He had imagined her the living incarnation of the _Tabula Smaragdina_, the very key to the operation of the sun, the Great Work. Yet in the same breath, he had damned her as a succubus for torturing his flesh in ways beyond his comprehension; he had made her suffer horrors because he could not bear to suffer alone.

And after this, to receive _not_ a curse, but a _blessing_ from her mother…?

The anchoress was a holy woman, dead to the world these fifteen years, he told himself. If she spoke at times in ways that unnerved him, of matters scarcely decent, it was, no doubt, the legacy of her sinful past: she was too ignorant to express herself less crudely. What she offered was Christian forgiveness and mercy, of which he knew he was unworthy. Yes, he should teach her as she requested, he thought: it would be a partial act of expiation for the wrong he had done her child.

For her part, Pâquette wondered at the idea of a passion that could throw law and reason aside. Highly sexed since puberty, she was well acquainted with lust: the uncomplicated desire that starts above the garters and ends on a mattress, whether straw or feather, on the floor or against a wall. She had discovered early, almost by accident, that men would pay, and that she could turn a pleasurable pastime to her profit. She knew men's bodies, their physical needs, far too well; but of their love she knew little.

Crimes of passion and kingdoms put to flame belonged in the old songs, in her minstrel father's tales. She recalled the tale of the long-ago poet from the south, in his wolf-skins; the old Count of Champagne singing of the unicorn, slain while swooning in the virgin's lap; Lancelot and Tristan in their madnesses. It seemed ridiculous, incongruous, to imagine this soft-spoken yet intense scholar, with his balding, tonsured head and his black cassock, in such a fellowship of knights and poets.

And for what Guenevere or Iseult had he run mad and wrought all this ruin?

– For her Agnès, her lost lamb: pretty, petty Agnès, who had no thoughts in her head beyond momentary fun and handsome soldiers. The extremity of it thrilled as well as alarmed her. What might _she_ have done with a man of such passions, and with such a mind, at her feet – and not merely with his money? And from what she _might have_ done, her thoughts began to turn to what she _could_ do…

It appalled (and amused) her that so learned a man understood so little of his body: that the mere presence of an attractive woman, whether in reality or dream, made him terrified of any involuntary response. Even the youngest and most innocent of her customers had not been so filled with dread; rather, eager to learn. He suffered needlessly, she thought: might the cure for his ignorance be an act of charity, not a sin? After all, she was a mistress of arts that were _not_ taught in the university…

* * *

The prospect of teaching again – even a little – lifted Claude's spirits. For him, education paralleled alchemy: taking the base _prima materia_, judged worthless by the world, to refine it through repetitive but progressive processes. The interaction of teacher and student enacted Miriam's "_Solve et coagula_" between two minds, to transform and transfigure both (for the educational experience changes the teacher, too). With Pierre and even with Quasimodo, simple as he was, he had achieved some success. Ordinarily, he would have had misgivings about such proximity to a woman, but since Sister Gudule was, like himself, under vows and a bodily ruin, there ought to be little danger. (He clung to the image of her as she was now, thin and grey, and tried to banish his first memories of her immurement.)

Mother Sibylle was glad to see him taking an interest in life again. "You need occupation and younger company," she opined, shaking his pillows. "Too much brooding isn't good for you!"

"I wasn't strong enough to do much else before," he said.

"Well, that's true. What will you do for books?"

"I've asked Father Thierry to arrange for Pierre to bring some from my rooms in the cloister. We won't need many to begin with."

"I _hope_ all goes well," she said.

"I'm sure it will: Sister Gudule has a quick mind, I think."

"– Though she's had _much_ to repent with it."

"So have I, as you know," he said with a sad smile.

Pierre was glad to help. It would at least keep Pâquette and Esméralda from each other's throats, he thought. They were both stubborn women (almost as stubborn as Djali, but less adorable with it), and all too often he felt himself caught between them. Pâquette needed something to engage her mind, and if he had any anxieties about her morals, he kept them to himself.

He knew Dom Claude's study well: for a few years it had served as his own schoolroom. He knew the arrangement of the books, down to the last treatise: apart from a number of newer acquisitions, nothing had changed. Yet, unoccupied these last months, the room seemed lifeless, save for a spider spinning a web in the window.

Glancing along the shelves, he plucked out the primer and grammar with which Claude had taught him. He remembered their lessons: the archdeacon, normally so austere and withdrawn, in flights of enthusiasm at being able to share his passion for philosophy, theology, poetry and rhetoric. "Master the Humanities and over a thousand years of learning is yours! Latin and Greek; Hebrew, too, if you've the strength for it. With these, all other subjects can be unlocked!"

"What about the Saracen tongue?"

"The Arab has refined, has developed the thought of the Greek – in mathematics, in natural philosophy and in medicine, yes; but then has been rendered back into Greek or Latin: Rhazes and Geber, and Avicenna and Averroes. Still, I may learn it _yet_, Gringoire!"

It was a pity to see him now, a shadow of what he had been. Pierre shivered as he left the cloister, remembering another great scholar, maimed in vengeance for a love that had blossomed in a house there, over books and lessons. After four centuries, all Paris still told the tale of Canon Fulbert's niece:

_Pour qui chastré fut et puis moyne  
Pierre Esbaillart a Saint-Denis?_

At least the history of Dom Claude's calamities would remain private, between those involved.

_Pour son amour ot ceste essoyne_…(3)

* * *

Claude sat up in bed for the lesson. Given the weakness of his arms, it was easier for him to have his books beside him on the covers, without having to reach far for them. Pâquette was in the chair at his right side, plain and chaste in her drab woollen gown and linen cap. He felt _safe_

.

They began by looking at familiar texts in the household breviary: the _Pater Noster_, and the _Ave_. Claude pointed out how many words were similar to French, Latin being its source and mother.

"Since you can already read in our own tongue, sister, you have the advantage over our friend Gringoire: he read nothing at all when he came to me. So you should be able to recognise many words, and from this gain a general understanding of the meaning, before we look more closely. In Latin, the endings of words, not their order, establish the sense."

This boosted Pâquette's confidence, although she was a little daunted when he showed her tables of noun declensions and conjugations of verbs.

"It's not as difficult as it looks, trust me. The verbs, too, are not unlike our own in some ways. If we begin with the first conjugation – Oh! Why always _this_…?"

"What is it?"

He swallowed. "The template for a verb of the first conjugation – the _-are_ type, like our -_er_ type – is… _amare_. It means…"

"To love or like?" she suggested.

"Yes. It is almost the same as our French, is it not? Then you will understand: _Amo_."

"I love."

"_Amas_."

"You (_tu_) love."

"_Amat_."

"He or she loves."

"_Amamus_."

"We love."

"_Amatis_."

"You (_vous_) love."

"_Amant_."

"They love – and that _is_ almost the same."

He nodded.

She smiled guilelessly (which took some effort, since she had, all the while, been admiring the form of his shoulders and chest through his fine chemise). "So how would I say, 'I love you'?"

He turned his head away from her. "I wish the books would use some other verb as an example. It is not at all suitable, under the circumstances…"

"But we're not _really_ speaking of love, only of Latin words. Just an example."

"Even so, perhaps it would be better…" He scratched his head. "_Pugnare_ goes the same way: it means 'to fight'."

"But 'to fight' is much worse than 'to love'."

"_Laudare_, then: to praise."

"Like '_Te Deum laudamus_'?"

"Yes! Now, what do you think that means?"

"Well, _Te_ must be 'you', just the same as when we use it, and _Deum_ is 'God', yes? But if that's -_amus_, it must be 'we praise_'_. So, with the 'm' on _Deum_…"

"That's because it is God _whom_ we are praising, the object of praise."

"So it's 'We praise you, God', then?"

"Yes, very good! Well done, sister!"

"And so 'I love you' would be '_te amo_'?"

Claude blanched beneath his natural swarthiness.

She smiled, showing the gaps between her remaining teeth. "It's _just_ an example."

"Yes. Yes…"

Noting his uneasiness, she narrowed her eyes. "We're not spiders, you know, we women, trying to snare you in our webs."

He remembered the web in his study: flies caught in the web of Fate… "No… You're _not_ _her_."

"You know, it's only right that I pay you in kind," she said sweetly. "I can teach you, but not with books."

"Do you speak of aught that's _sinful_?"

"Not at all." (_Yet_, she thought.) "I mean you don't need to _hide_ from women. You'd control yourself better if you weren't afraid all the time, running off at the rustle of a skirt."

"How is that possible?"

"You can learn to talk to a woman; to look at her when you're talking to her. It would be better for you – for your work and all – if you didn't fear your own flesh so."

"To be free of this burden…? By God, I should have prayed for Abelard's fate!" He was only half-joking.

"No: that's _wrong_. Don't even think it!"

"Why? Life would have been so much easier… When it began last summer, I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep…"

"Has a girl done this to you before?" Pâquette asked.

"No. I'd rarely noticed any other, or had soon forgotten if I did."

"Ah. Well, that explains it. About twenty years late, but…"

"What do you mean?"

"First love. It's like measles: the later it strikes, the worse it is."

"Has it happened to you?"

She shook her head. "Nothing serious. I exchanged it for a gold cross: it was proof against it."

"You don't wear it now."

"I left it as an offering at a roadside calvary, for my daughter's sake, when I was walking from Reims."

"So how may I learn from you?" he asked. "What lesson…?"

"It's already begun. We've been talking, haven't we? And not too uncomfortably?"

"But that's _different_."

"What about the other sisters, then? You must have got used to them nursing you by now. They were doing everything for you, weren't they? Did _they_ ever scare or tempt you?"

He thought for a moment. At first, he had been too badly wounded to be aware of any loss of dignity. When he regained consciousness, he had become shy and frightened, but they had reassured him tenderly. "No. It's more like having several mothers at once. There is no sin in their thoughts, or in their treatment of me."

"So you see that not _all_ women _are_ trying to tempt you?"

"That's true… But… to speak frankly, I don't see them _as_ women – not in the same way as…"

"Because they're old and uncomely? Do you not think of _me_ as a woman, then?"

Claude hesitated. Even _he_ realised that to call a woman prematurely aged to her face was discourteous: Esméralda had hurt him by repeatedly calling him "old and ugly". Besides, he was not sure if he entirely believed it of Sister Gudule: if he let his guard slip, he saw her daughter in her – her features, her expressions – and remembered her in her cell so many years ago. "You're Esm– Agnès's mother. And you, too, are avowed."

"But suppose I had been a parishioner of yours: Mademoiselle Guybertaut?" She removed her cap, and smoothed with her hand the grey curls that were now just long enough to be scraped back and pinned into a small knot at the back of her head. Despite the colour, it took years from her, making her seem nearer her true age.

To defend himself, he looked down at the Latin primer. "I–I used to talk to husbands and fathers, not to single…"

"Neglecting some of your flock? Fie! – Would you _please_ look me in the eye when you talk to me, monsieur?"

"That would be immodest, Sister Gudule…"

"Dom Claude, my name is Pâquette."

"Pâquette…" He struggled to think of something to say. How _did_ one make small talk? "Your birthday must be at Eastertide, then?" Still he kept his gaze lowered.

"Yes, on Easter Day – thirty-six years past, I think."

"A few months older than I, then…"

"Indeed. Now _look_ at me, monsieur."

"I _can't_."

She placed her hand beneath his chin and, very gently, turned his face – all strong angles and hollows – away from his book and towards her. He coloured as their eyes met but, steeling himself, did not shy away. She thought of youths she had deflowered years ago: the appeal of innocence is its essential and necessary transience, its so-called 'corruptibility'. He tried not to think of anything at all – but her touch was light and her gaze was gentle: a stricken girl seen through a haze of incense…

"That's better!" she said. "Are you all right?"

"I _think_ so."

"There's nothing to fear, you see."

"Perhaps not. Perhaps not from _you_."

"Good." She put her cap back on, deliberately leaving a stray curl hanging at the side. "I think we're going to learn _a lot_ from each other."

* * *

Pierre was more impressed than Esméralda at her mother's new ability to recite case-endings and conjugations, and quotations of odd lines from hymns and prayers. However, when he asked her (more at Esméralda's expense) whether it was true that:

_clerus scit diligere  
virginem plus milite_ (4)

Pâquette said that she did not, as yet, understand all the word he used.

Claude sent him back to the cloister for a few more books, and as he returned, he noticed a stranger standing in the street, outside the house. He was a pleasant-looking fellow of about forty, dark and sturdy. His dress and bearing suggested a prosperous craftsman or tradesman, a stalwart of one of the guilds. From the way that he glanced about him, he did not appear completely lost, and yet he seemed to be searching.

"Are you looking for someone?" Pierre asked.

"As a matter of fact, I am. I heard that the anchoress from the Tour Roland was staying hereabouts – Sister Gudule."

Pierre eyed the man curiously. "And if she is, what's your interest in her?"

"I've been worried about her for weeks now: her cell being all ruined, and word of that commotion in the Grève – I wondered if she was all right. She's my cousin, you see – Mademoiselle Guybertaut."

Pierre's face lit up. "_Pasque-Dieu_! Then you must be… one of the _Pradons_, yes?"

"Yes: Germain Pradon, brass and copper founder, at your service."

"Pierre Gringoire, philosopher, poet and entertainer!"

"So you know her, then?"

"I should hope so: she's my mother-in-law."

Pradon blinked. He had the same round-eyed stare that Pierre had seen on the faces of Pâquette and Esméralda. "How's that possible? She had but one child, and the poor mite was stolen and eaten!"

"It's a _long_ story, but _no_, she wasn't!"

The older man looked decidedly confused.

"I think you'd better come in. She's staying with us here, with the Sisters of Saint Anne."

Pierre led the visitor in by way of the yard, where Esméralda was practising dance-steps, which Djali was to follow in _simplified_ form. Djali knew, of course, when she was being patronised by humans: her cloven hooves were far more graceful and light-stepping than their flat, clumsy feet ever could be. She trotted delicately, with an air of intellectual superiority that was certainly justifiable regarding her present dancing-partner.

Germain Pradon gawped at the girl: it was as if the misery of recent years had vanished from the woman he sought. "Sweet Jesus! Her very image!"

"Esm – Agnès, can you fetch your mother, please?"

Esméralda pirouetted, not sure where to turn. "What – what?"

"It's all right: this gentleman is your kinsman."

Djali circled him, sniffing at his clothes suspiciously. He smelled like coins. For some reason, humans _liked_ coins, but to her, they were by no means as interesting as vegetables. Strangely, though, her humans seemed upset if anyone threw vegetables at _them_. Pradon looked down at her. He was sure that he had seen her before: some sort of performing animal. Tentatively, he reached out a hand. She thrust her nose eagerly into the palm.

Esméralda protested: "But my mother's with the arch–"

"Then ask her to come down at once!"

_**Next chapter:**__ More about the Pradons; Pâquette's campaign of attrition continues_

* * *

(1) Pâquette's turn of phrase echoes the proverbial refrain, '_Ne que monnoye qu'on descrie'_, of François Villon's _Ballade de la Belle Heaulmière aux filles de joie_, from _Le Grand Testament_. See also epigraph to Chapter 8. The aged whore, the Fair Helmet-maker's Lass, advises younger prostitutes to make the most of their chances before they end up as 'devalued coin'.

(2) An old song by Thibaut de Champagne. The full stanza runs:

_I am like a unicorn  
Who wonders in gazing  
At the virgin, admiring when she comes.  
So bound up is he in his anguish,  
He falls swooning in her lap;  
Then they slay him treacherously.  
And they have slain me the same way,  
Love and my lady, as you see;  
My heart cannot recover at all._

(3) Villon, _Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis_ in _Le Grand Testament_:

_For whom was gelded and made monk  
Pierre Abelard at Saint-Denis?  
For his love he bore this suffering/penalty._

(I inscribed the last line on the background of a portrait I painted of Claude.)

(4) From _F__rigus hinc est horridum_ (_Carmina Burana_ MS 82):

_A cleric knows how to love/esteem  
A maid better than a soldier._


End file.
